This week’s episode is brought to you by Harry’s. What if there was a 50% off sale happening every time you went shopping for razors? Well, shaving with Harry’s his kind of like that. They offer premium blade refills as low as $2 each, and that’s up to 55% off compared to the price of Gillette fusion pro shield.

Harry’s believes everyone deserves quality shaving supplies at a fair price. They don’t inflate blade prices or add unnecessary features to their razors like flex balls or heated handles, tactics the leading brands have been using to raise prices for decades. Harry’s team combined a simple ergonomic design with five sharp blades, and that’s what I’ve always liked best. Harry’s is just a simple, clean design that does the job I need it to do. I literally don’t need or want any of that other stuff. And Harry’s has always kept things nice and simple.

Harry’s has an amazing offer for listeners of my show. New customers get $5 off a trial set at harrys.com/revolutions. You’ll get a five blade razor weighted handle foaming shave gel with aloe and the travel cover. So join the millions of guys who are already saving money and go to harrys.com/revolutions to claim your offer.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.35 Sinking Ships

When Tsar Nicholas issued his little collection of imperial edicts on February the 18th, 1905, he was no doubt hoping that this would be the moment the fever that had been raging since the summer of 1904 finally broke. He had heard his people, offered concessions, and directed his minister of the interior to come up with a workable plan to create space for popular participation in government. So having satisfied everyone, can the wave of protests and strikes and demonstrations and just general disorder stop now? Please? As your tsar I, uh, command it?

But the fever was not going to break, because what ailed Russia had not yet been properly diagnosed, nor were these concessions sufficient medicine. And, there were yet more pathogens to enter the body of tsarist autocracy, keeping it bedridden for the rest of the year.

While he was hoping these hopes, Nicholas was also praying to god for good news from the far east, an end to the humiliations and setbacks in the war against Japan. Nicholas was praying for something, anything that would balance the endless run of bad news. And for all this praying Nicholas… got you guessed it, further humiliations and setbacks. Specifically, just as the February Acts were being issued, the Russian army and Japanese army squared off at the battle of Mukden, which not only turned out to be a battle that served as something of a harbinger for what was to come in World War I just a few years later, but it was also straight up one of the largest land battles in military history up to that point. It featured about 340,000 Russians against 260,000 Japanese, their army now consolidated thanks to the fall of Port Arthur.

The battle of Mukden was not a single set piece affair, but raged for two weeks over extended lines with control of southern Manchuria at stake. Over the course of these grizzly weeks, the Russians took close to 90,000 casualties between killed, captured, and wounded. The Japanese rate was even worse, they suffered 75,000 casualties. So both sides suffered enormously, but in the end of the Russian army could not hold their line, and they fell back in chaotic and demoralized retreat.

But the Japanese by this point were exhausted themselves. Having endured way more casualties and expenses than they had anticipated before the initial attack on Port Arthur, they were now also facing overextended supply lines, and they were unable to pursue the Russians to finish the war right then and there. So, though, this was yet another defeat for Russia, it’s not like the empire of Japan was dancing around with a jaunty spring in its step. The war wasn’t over, and the Russian Baltic fleet now rechristened the Second Pacific Fleet was still chugging their way around the world, and on course for what the tsar hoped would be their divine destiny: to rescue Russia.

But while the defeat at Mukden did not yet end the war, it did lead to further piles of scorn being heaped on the tsar. In particular, the gruesome casualty rate lent further credence to accusations leveled at the regime that they were all incompetent and spending Russian blood and treasure with no plan or purpose. This latest arousal of outrage was then fed directly into a whirlwind of open political activity that had been stirred up by the tsar’s declaration that it was legal to petition the government, to make suggestions about how the state could be better run. So all over the empire, people got together to discuss what they should put into these petitions, especially liberals and reformists and constitutionalists from the professional classes, who would get together at the Free Economic Society, or houses of wealthier members, or at school halls, or in newspaper offices to discuss politics. Which technically, the tsar had not given them permission to do.

But what these open meetings did, in essence, was assert that along with the right to petition came an implied right to free assembly and freedom of speech. So, when the police authorities would come around to one of these meetings, they would just say, hey, we’re doing exactly what the tsar told us we could do, so buzz off. Now there were limits to this, obviously it’s not like the SRs could meet in a cafe and shout, hey, I’ve got an idea for reform. Let’s kill the tsar. But in general, political organizing and discussion was now tolerated, if for no other reason than the police simply didn’t have the resources to shut it all down even if they wanted to.

Now along with this asserted freedom of assembly and speech, came defacto freedom of the press, as journals and newspapers reported all these discussions, brazenly flouting the existing censorship laws that, again, the authorities were not actually strong enough to enforce. So, the traditional mechanisms of autocratic political repression were quite simply breaking down everywhere, and it really did seem like a new political era was dawning.

In the initial stages of this new era, most of these meetings, speeches, statements, and organizations were led by respectable liberal reformists, who were pitching respectable liberal reform. But just underneath the surface was the hand of the Union of Liberation, who were clearly becoming the most influential and potent of all of the underground revolutionary parties, largely because their whole mission was to forge a single monolithic anti-tsarist coalition. So they were happy to include all the other underground revolutionary parties, as well as above ground respectable liberals. So the Union of Liberation became a very necessary connective hub for all of the forces driving at revolution. And they weren’t just knitting together a coalition, they were also driving that revolution. Radical democratic members of the Union of Liberation were participating in all of these above ground liberal meetings and discussions, and they were always trying to get people to demand more, and push harder.

The most important of these was Pavel Milyukov, who had been on a speaking tour in the United States when the revolution broke out, and who arrived back in Russia in April, to hopefully be there for the founding of a new democratic constitutional monarchy for Russia. Milyukov spoke the language of democratic constitutional liberalism, which appealed to the constitutionalists, but he had also paid his dues as an enemy of the tsar. He had endured imprisonment and exile, just like the hardest core revolutionaries had, and they respected him for it. The SRs at one point actually asked him if he wanted to join their central committee, but he declined. They may have shared a single common goal — break the back of the autocracy and create a world of political freedom — but after that, they had very different visions about what the future of Russia ought to look like.

Many of these political gathering started out as improvised affairs, so the Union of Liberation worked to bring some order to it. They started organizing professional unions, which could act as political pressure groups. Now, this is something that had gotten going in the summer of 1904 when Mirsky had been brought in to the Ministry of the Interior, but after Bloody Sunday, professional organizing got going in a more systematic and open way. Soon, there was a union for lawyers, and one for doctors, and one for professors, also journalists, agronomists, teachers, veterinarians, pharmacists, and railroad employees. By May of 1905, there were 14 of these professional unions, including groups that were not directly linked to a profession at all but instead, a cause. For example, the Union for the Attainment of Full Rights for the Jewish People of Russia and the Union of Equal Rights for Women, the first organization dedicated fully to the defense of women’s rights as such, as opposed to the socialist or narodist programs that included gender equality amongst many other demands. The use of the word “union” here is a bit misleading — these were not labor unions, they were associations of professionals. And when they first started getting together, they drafted their own petitions to the tsar, which pounded mostly on liberal democratic political demands. But as members of the Union of Liberation were in the middle of all of this, there was also an effort to support the workers movement, and so, to include in their petitions demands for an eight hour day, better wages, pensions, and medical care to make sure that everybody stayed apart of the same anti-tsarist movement. We’re all in this together.

Speaking of those workers, as we saw last week, the initial wave of strikes kicked off by Bloody Sunday wound down by the end of January. But that was just the beginning of everything, not the end of anything. In St. Petersburg, the regime sought to establish a commission to investigate what happened on Bloody Sunday, and in a magnanimous gesture they wanted representatives of the workers to participate. These representatives were to be selected by nine electoral assemblies created specifically to perform this single task.

But socialists leaped at the opportunity to start influencing events, and they made sure to show up at these assemblies ready to do some influencing… and it worked. The St. Petersburg workers refuse to vote on representatives until the government guaranteed certain things, including the audacious demand that the findings of the commission be made public. When the government balked, the workers boycotted the election, and then the tsar decided to just shutter the whole commission and forget it. This made the workers angry, so just as the February Acts were being disseminated, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job yet again in protest. Now, these strikes were neither as long, nor as large as the great January strike, but it was proof that the situation was still incredibly volatile, and the workers were far from satisfied.

Elsewhere, the empire continued to be hit by sporadic strikes. So while January 1905 kicked off with something close to 500,000 workers walking off the job at some point, February saw 290,000 workers participating in some kind of strike action, often in areas that had not even been touched by the first wave. Now these strikes happened spontaneously and seemingly at random in terms of who and when and where and what industries were hit. In the first third of 1905, they were also often so spontaneous that it wasn’t until after the workers walked off the job that they attempted to formulate specific demands, most of which at this stage were still purely of the economic variety, right? Shorter hours, higher wages, safety standards, sanitation. But as the year progressed, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks and SRs and people from the Union of Liberation started making better and more stable connections to the working class leadership. And most importantly, they were feeding the workers, literature and news and pamphlets that joined these economic strikes to a wider political movement, and as 1905 progresses, we see a marked uptick in workers going on strike knowing in advance the demands they were striking for, and having democratic political things on that list.

The liberal intelligentsia, meanwhile, consistently expressed support for the workers, either out of genuine concern for their well-being, or simply enjoying the strategic value all this industrial disorder had for their own political reform project. Industrialists and manufacturers inside the reform movement for example, loved to tell their contacts in the Ministry of Finance that really what the workers wanted was political reform, and the economic concessions, which I think we can all agree would cripple the economy anyway, were of merely secondary concern.

The number of strikes slackened a bit in March and April, but even still close to 80,000 workers walked off the job in both of those months, even if it was only for a day or two. By mid April the regime was forced to conclude that an 1897 edict making striking a criminal act was simply unenforceable. They couldn’t arrest all the workers because soon enough there would be no labor force left. Not that the police could handle such an operation anyway. So I think we can add “right to strike” to a list of reforms that the regime was forced to accept in the face of political, economic, and social reality. They were even forced to admit that limited police actions targeting leaders was pretty counterproductive, because the standard punishment was to exile those working class leaders back to their home villages, which turned out to be a really great way to get the most radicalized voices to return home and start stirring up trouble amongst their friends, family, and neighbors back home, helping activate the thus far inert peasantry… and it is to the peasants who we now turn our attention.

The course of events in 1904 and 1905 had lead the regime to hope that the unrest would remain confined to the cities and the industrial areas, which were still very small pockets in the grand scheme of things. Nicholas and Alexandra were of course personally convinced that the real people of Russia, the good and noble peasants, continued to love them unconditionally. But just to be sure, the regime went out of its way not to spread the news of the tsar’s acts of February the 18th, which confirmed the right to petition. So unlike say the emancipation decree, which was read in every village church in the empire, the February decrees were really not. But the regime could not keep this information under wraps because the zemstvo liberals and others aligned with the political opposition out in the provinces sprang into action, and made it their business to spread the news far and wide. And while they may have been more temperamentally conservative, it’s not like the peasants didn’t have their own deep grievances they wanted the tsar to fix. We do not have enough land to support our families. The rent we pay for leased land is too high. The wages we receive for day labor is too low. Also, we would like access to timber and pasture land that is still being claimed as the exclusive preserve of the state and the nobility.

Adding to these longstanding complaints was a growing anti-war sentiment, and in the villages, this anti-war sentiment was not abstract, it was personal. The Russian army was primarily composed of peasant conscripts, so the lived reality of the Russo-Japanese war for the peasants was watching husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers taken off to go fight a war that was quickly revealed to be as pointless as it was incompetently led. And all the news of the death and destruction and the far east right up through the retreat at Mukden was then followed by more reservists being activated. And in the villages the attitude is what are you doing? Don’t send more of our boys off to die for nothing. End the war.

So compounding these factors, by the spring of 1905, many workers who had personally witnessed events of the previous winter were now coming back home with lurid tales of murder and revolution, and spreading around the ideas that had animated at all. This lead the peasants to start participating in these momentous events in two ways. First, village councils would get together and come up with their own petitions to send the tsar, featuring their own demands: more land, cheaper rent, higher wages — and, when they felt particular, purely bold, the biggest ask of all: take all that land is held by the state and the tsar and the nobility and transfer it to the people. But also influenced by local members of the rural intelligentsia, these petitions also routinely demanded a democratic national assembly, civil liberties and local self-government. These were the same kind of political demands that were now being tacked on to the worker petitions at the same time that they were being hammered in the press and by the zemstvos and by the various professional unions.

So on this front, political reform, all of Russia did seem to be speaking with one voice. But alongside this peaceful path of petition, plenty of peasants took a more aggressive approach, embracing the tactics that had been used during that sweep of rural unrest that had swept across southern Russia in 1902, which we talked about in Episode 10.30, and that was target large estates for looting and burning. These direct attacks on the local magnate was particularly heavy in the Volga region where the SRs had been making inroads, but it’s not like the SRs were some invisible hand guiding the peasants to revolution. Most of this, by the admission of the SR’s own agents out in the field, was spontaneous and self-directed. The common pattern was for peasants drawn from a cluster of villages around some particular estate to agree to congregate at that estate on a certain day. Then, numbering as many as 6 or 700, they would push their way in and loot the premises, making sure to locate the office where the debt and obligation records were kept and burn those in a giant pile. And then, as a grand finale, sometimes they would burn whole buildings to the ground. One of the earliest and most dramatic incidents was at an estate of Grand Duke Sergei’s in the Orloff province run by a notoriously cruel manager. Two weeks after the Grand Duke’s assassination, hundreds descended on this estate. They looted and redistributed whatever wasn’t nailed down, and then lit the place on fire. It took a contingent of regular army troops to break this all up.

But these direct attacks on the estates were not physically violent affairs. Managers and owners, even if they were hated, were told just to go stand off to one side and not get in the way. No one was being lined up against the wall and shot.

At least, not yet.

February, March, and April each saw a hundred or so such incidents across the empire. So this is not like the whole peasantry is now up in arms. But once the weather started warming up and the regime continued to flail, the number of these local insurrections increased out in the countryside.

These direct peasant actions led to a debate opening up inside the ranks of the SRs about the nature and utility of so-called economic terrorism. Some younger and more radical SRs argued that they needed to expand their target list beyond the narrow pool of political and police officials, because equally culpable in the people’s suffering and equally standing in the way of full agrarian socialism, were landlords and estate managers and bankers and industrialists. Just because you were technically a private citizen didn’t mean you weren’t a core cog in the apparatus of oppression. Plus, engaging directly against landlords and managers might actually bring on board peasants who are still struggling to accept that the tsar was not their benevolent and protective father. So on a practical level, it would be easier to radicalize the peasantry against local landlords than it was to radicalize them against the tsar.

This debate led to further arguments about how fast they should be moving now that the revolution appeared to be on. Most SR central committee members though, including their leading theorist, Victor Chernov, believed that decentralized agrarian socialism could only be accomplished after the political revolution was done, after the freedomless autocracy had been toppled. So even terrorist tactics had to reflect that single-minded political focus. Besides, killing hated members of the regime was one thing, but killing landlords and businessmen might, for example, spook liberal reformists into a reactionary posture too soon.

But those younger and more radical SRs were saying, no, we can do it now, we can do it all at once. We should attack and terrorize all the exploitive forces in society right now today, and start trying to seize and redistribute land. And this debate was the origin of the split inside the SRs, which lead to the more extremist SR Maximalists to break away and pursue their own faster, more violent and more direct route to agrarian socialism.

And while we’re here talking about these internal SR debates, I should mention that there were also internal debates inside the social democratic circles, especially along that Bolshevik-Menshevik divide. Lenin and his Bolsheviks argued that because the liberals and bourgeoisie in Russia were still pretty small and weak, that if the proletariat played a decisive role in toppling the tsarist regime, that they could win a powerful position inside the resulting democratic government. So much so that the period of quote unquote bourgeois rule that was implied by the two-stage revolution theory could be dramatically shortened.

And I’ll mention this in passing now, but we’re going to discuss it a lot more later, that Trotsky is already well on his way to articulating a theory of permanent revolution that will take this argument to its logical conclusion. To achieve this decisive place inside the post-autocratic government, the Bolsheviks also argued in favor of immediate armed insurrection, not just playing the peaceful game of petition and strikes and pressure and working for the liberals rather than alongside the liberals.

Martov and the Mensheviks, meanwhile, were far more in favor of holding off on the need for armed insurrection, and they planned to ride out the period of inevitable bourgeois liberal rule without trying to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat too soon. As a result, we find Mensheviks in Russia far more willing to collaborate with the liberals and the Union of Liberation throughout 1905. But these arguments among the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party members were largely being held in an émigré vacuum, and as we discussed last week, they were happening at such a distance that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks inside Russia were just improvising tactics and strategy at quite a remove from the alleged leaders of their respective parties.

So if we look back now over the course of the revolution so far, we find ourselves nearing the end of the fourth phase of the revolution. The first phase actually happened back in 1904, and was defined by the liberal opposition that culminated with the Zemstvo Congress of November, 1904. The second phase was defined by Father Gapon and his assembly, and culminated obviously with Bloody Sunday. The third phase was that wave of protest which culminated with the tsar’s February edicts, and now here the fourth phase is culminating in May 1905, when a number of currents converged simultaneously.

The first of these was the convergence of the workers movement and socialist agitation on May Day, 1905. May Day kicked off a whole new surge of worker strikes after the lull of March and April, and these were really important because it was the first time that the socialists managed to organize, and dare I say, lead the workers out of the factories. Up until now the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks and the SRs had always been hopping in to influence strikes after they had spontaneously broken out, but with May the first now declared International Workers Day, the socialist agitators planned events in advance and got the workers to go along with it. The strikes orchestrated in the first week of May then jolted the workers across the empire back to life and shot the number of strikers from the tens of thousands back into the hundreds of thousands. And then about a week after the May Day strike started, the Union of Liberation completed the next phase of their plan: joining together all the professional unions they had organized into a single force.

On May the eighth and ninth, 60 delegates representing fourteen unions voted to form a single union of unions. That’s what they call it, the Union of Unions. This new Union of Unions then elected Pavel Milyukov to be its chairman, which meant they were not here to be cautious and conciliatory. The Union of Unions was specifically organized to act as something like the public face of the Union of Liberation. Their objectives were overtly political and very radical, and they would push forever more audacious plans that were now being formed by the Union of Liberation, which included a call for truly universal democratic suffrage, and by truly universal, I mean, they were now arguing for women’s right to vote.

But if you know anything at all about the Revolution of 1905, you know the really big event of May 1905: the Battle of Tsushima.

While the regime grappled with domestic chaos, Tsar Nicholas had continued to pray for good news from the far east, prayers that had thus far gone unanswered. After the Battle of Mukden, all hopes and prayers now rested on the Baltic fleet, which had been redubbed the Second Pacific Squadron. Having departed in October 1904, this fleet of ships, plus an array of auxiliary boats, had been sailing around the world. And this Second Pacific Squadron included the largest and newest ships in the Russian navy: eleven battleships, plus cruisers and destroyers of various shapes and sizes, and they traveled around the tip of Africa to Madagascar, and then across the Indian Ocean.

Meanwhile, a third Pacific Squadron composed of lighter and older ships were also dispatched, taking the more direct route through the Suez Canal. Now, since our principle interest here is the effect of all of this on the Revolution of 1905, I am not going to do a play-by-play of this ignominious voyage of the damned, but if you are interested, there is such an entertaining play-by-play a bunch of you have sent it to me, they are very detailed and highly entertaining YouTube videos by navy history creator Drachinifel, which covers both the voyage of the damned and the resulting Battle of Tsushima.

The short version though, is that after seven months and 18,000 miles, the Russian fleet was finally approaching Japan in May 1905. Since their original mission to relieve Port Arthur had been mooted by the fall of Port Arthur, all the Russian Navy was trying to do at this point was push on to Vladivostok to regroup.

On May the 15th, they tried to sail through the straits of Tsushima, straits that were blocked by the whole Japanese navy, a Japanese navy that had spent the last few months relentlessly practicing for this very confrontation. They knew the Russian navy was coming, and they were going to stop them.

The essential Japanese strategy was to concentrate all their fire on one Russian battleship at a time, so, when the two fleets came into contact, that’s what they did. The Battle of Tsushima lasted all through the afternoon to the 15th, through the night, and then recommenced on the morning of the 16th. And while the whole thing is a very confusing mess, made more confusing by fog and mistakes and miscommunications, the final result was unambiguous disaster for the Russians. By the time the last small contingent of Russian ships surrendered on the morning of the 16th, almost the entire squadron had been sunk or scuttled, including all eleven battleships. So on May the 15th, this Russian fleet had carried with it the hopes and dreams and prayers of the whole Empire, and on the morning of the 16th, that Russian fleet simply did not exist.

Now, a few ships managed to break away from this debacle and they were either taken into custody by the Chinese, or a few arrived down in Manila and were taken into custody by the Americans. Only three Russian ships managed to complete the voyage to Vladivostok.

The Battle of Tsushima was a short, decisive, and devastating end to the Russo-Japanese war. It was the Russian Empire’s final humiliation in what had been a humiliating string of humiliations.

The Battle of Tsushima was an almost incomprehensible piece of news back in St. Petersburg. The tsar had gone into this war essentially by accident, and was so brimming with confidence at the outset that the whole of the empire was convinced that it would be quick and easy. Failures in the far east had then come so rapidly and seemed so incongruous with everybody’s expectations that it had shaken the core legitimacy of the tsarist regime. And despite all his praying, Nicholas now faced the unthinkable. There was no more hope. Russia was defeated. They lost the war. Through back channels, the tsar accepted an offer from US President Theodore Roosevelt to broker a treaty.

Now, obviously there’s never a good time to lose a war, but having news of the disaster at Tsushima arrive just as the revolutionary fever is rising in the spring of 1905… that meant that all the tsar’s problems were compounded to the point where he would be hard pressed to ever escape them.

Next week, in the wake of defeat abroad, Nicholas’s beloved absolute autocracy would find itself facing defeat at home.

 

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. Trade Coffee is a coffee subscription service that delivers fresh coffee right to your doorstep. It makes an absolutely fantastic gift for the coffee lover in your life, or if you are the coffee lover in your life, it’s a great gift to suggest to people who are looking to get you a present.

Trade Coffee makes it easy and convenient to discover new coffees you never would have otherwise heard of. And one of the best things about the service is the variety of blends you’ll get to enjoy. Over the past year and a half or so, I’ve had cups from all over the country, all of them small businesses I can feel great about supporting. I’m presently drinking some Panther Coffee, the Mayor Blend, and as usual, it is fantastic.

So right now, Trade is offering our listeners a total of $30 off a subscription and access to limited time holiday specials at drinktrade.com/revolutions. That’s drinktrade.com/revolutions for $30 off.

drinktrade.com/revolutions.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Better Help. It would be nice if life came with an owner’s manual, something comprehensive we could refer to when things start getting rough. Ah, I see here turning to Chapter 7 subsection 15, that in this situation I am wildly overreacting to something innocuous and should probably just let it go. Ah, thanks, owner’s manual.

But, sadly, that’s not how any of this works. But there is a next best thing, and that next best thing is therapy. Therapy helps us frame and talk through problems in our lives so we can figure out how to handle the latest batch of issues that crop up. As the world’s largest therapy service, Better Help has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available 100% online. Plus it’s affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist. If things aren’t clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist any time. It couldn’t be simpler. There’s no waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist.

So learn more and save 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/revolutions.

That’s betterhelp.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, welcome to Revolutions.

The Final Episode: Adieu Mes Amis

I published the first episode of the Revolutions Podcast on September 15th, 2013. By the time that first episode aired, I had known about the show for about two years. I conceived of the idea while taking a class at the University of Texas, a story I told back in Appendix 1. When I did my year of grad school at Texas State, I took a course on the Mexican Revolution my first semester because I already knew what I was going to do after I graduated. My plan was to get a master’s degree in public history and then go off and do this podcast about great revolutions.

Instead, less than a year later, Mrs. Revolutions was offered a great job in Madison. She took it. I dropped out of grad school and we moved north in the spring of 2013. This advanced the timeline of when I thought Revolutions would happen, but Revolutions was definitely happening. And when we moved, it was time for it to happen.

Now, when we moved, we decided it would be okay for me to not go look for another day job. I had always had day jobs while working on the History of Rome. Advertising had entered the picture way back in 2009, but I always clung to the security of keeping a real job. But when we moved from Austin to Madison, we decided that I should not go out applying for jobs, that instead, I should take a crack at podcasting full time. We looked at the revenue I would need to be able to generate to make up for those missing wages and agreed that I could have one year to try to replace that income, just to see if it could be done. If, after a year, I was not successful and I wasn’t making up the wages, then I could just go find another job — but if it worked, then I could do this thing where I get to podcast full time.

Now this was not a small thing or an easy decision to make. Our son was just turning one at this point. This is not the most sensational time to decide, oh, I’m going to abandon financial security and go chase a dream. But the dream at least seemed plausible — after all, the history of Rome had been quite successful. So there I was in the summer of 2013 with this utterly helpless baby bouncing in my lap and I was just saying, well, okay, here I go. Let’s go work without a net. This is a great time to be doing this. I spent the spring and summer of 2013 as a stay-at-home dad, reading voraciously about the English Revolution during nap time, and in between trips to the park and the children’s museum.

Now this was a stressful period, obviously, and full of uncertainty, but I believed I had a good idea with Revolutions. Somewhere buried in the bins of my notebooks are the pages where I mapped out the original plan for all this. I knew that the threat of a sophomore slump loomed large after a successful debut. So the plan was to make this second podcast that followed up the History of Rome shorter and more limited in scope, to limit the risk of taking too large a bite and just choking. So yes, it was all mapped out to twelve to fifteen episodes on the English Revolution, then the American and French and Haitian Revolutions, probably Simone Bolivar in Spanish America, definitely Mexico and Russia, probably Ireland, Cuba definitely, then Algeria and Iran. On the back of my envelope, it projected to be about three and a half years of work. By the time it was done, I would have escaped being typecast as merely an ancient history guy, proven that I could do other periods competently, and after that I could do whatever I wanted.

But for sure it was essential that I not follow up the History of Rome with something so epically gargantuan as the History of Rome. I did not want to spend five years working on the next podcast.

So sitting here, recording this final episode of Revolutions more than nine years later, the following comparisons can be fruitfully made. The History of Rome wound up being 189 total episodes. Revolutions is winding up at 342. I have written and produced 342 episodes of Revolutions, including the episode you are listening to right now. That is 322 normal episodes, plus 20 supplementals. The History of Rome clocked in at roughly 74 total hours of material, that’s just over three days. That is so much! Revolutions we have now calculated stand at 190 hours, which is nearly eight full days. You could press play, come back a week later, and it would still be running. That’s kind of crazy.

Now as for the word count, the final transcript of the History of Rome is about 685,000 words. The combined transcripts for Revolutions, which I should mention are offensively mismanaged even by my own dismal standards, total up to 1.5 million words. I have written 1.5 million words while doing the Revolutions Podcast.

So do I regret having the initial plan breakdown so comprehensively? I absolutely do not. It’s one of the greatest things that’s ever happened to me. Some of those 1.5 million words and 190 hours of content in 342 episodes are some of the best and most rewarding work I have ever done in my life.

Now the initial plan in fact broke down almost immediately. After publishing Episode 1.1 in September of 2013, I started getting frustrated at how many things I was compressing and skipping over to squeeze my account of the English Revolution into a mere 15 episodes — and looking back, I now know the first season could have easily been 50 episodes. That’s how rich and dense and complicated it all is.

But I moved on to the American Revolution in early 2014, and as I did, I was doing my initial research for the French Revolution, and concluded that there was no point in trying to stick to the 15 episode format. If trying to fit the English Revolution into 15 episodes was frustrating, trying to fit the French Revolution into 15 episodes would be impossible. And so I asked myself the honest question, well, what kind of life are you trying to live here? If the complexity of these historical details are what’s exciting you so much, why deny yourself these most delicious fruits — I mean, after all it is your show. Do you want to live a life where you needlessly torture yourself over rules that you yourself created?

And I responded, nay, sir, I shall not live in this way. And so I did not.

So in my opinion, the Revolutions podcast really begins with Episode 3.1. When people ask me where they should start Revolutions, I tell them start at Season 3. That’s when it gets good. That’s when I get good. I say aside from a few stray references, mostly you don’t need to know anything from the first few seasons to understand what’s happening in the French Revolution. The world building begins there. The voice and groove and style of the Revolution’s podcast are established in Season 3, and so I uncorked 55 episodes on the French Revolution and never looked back.

But now that it is time to look back, it’s clear that if the Revolutions Podcast really starts with Episode 3.1, that it’s ultimately about the long 19th century and the great revolutions that defined its trajectory. The Revolutions Podcast is set between the twin pillars of 1789 and 1917, and if that’s what it ultimately became, I am more than okay with that. I think it’s cool as hell, honestly. I love it.

Now by the time the French Revolution series is rolling, the one year deadline to make the podcast work came and went. It worked. So I got to keep podcasting full time. I did not have to go get a real job.

Then, in March of 2015, right around the 250th episode, I got an email from a literary agent named Rachel Vogel.

Ever thought about writing a book, she asks.

Oh boy, have I ever, I reply.

So she said, well, what do you got?

And I sent her a bunch of ideas. A most of them were about the French Revolution because that’s what I was in the middle of. But attached to one of the emails was an idea I had to go back to Rome and cover this one particular period of late Republican history, and she said, well, that’s the one, let’s do it. So we spent the spring and summer putting together a book proposal for what would become The Storm Before the Storm.

So that brings us to the greatest day of my life, which I believe will remain the greatest day of my life for as long as I live. I mean, honestly, it’s impossible to beat. On September the 28th, 2015, two things happened. First, my daughter was born. I’ve got two kids, and that’s all the kids I’m ever going to have, so already here, we’re talking about a day of miraculous joy that is only even matched by one other day. But then, about six hours after she was born, I got a call from Rachel, saying Public Affairs would like to buy your book.

Now, this is pure insanity. I’ve wanted to write a book since I was a kid, so this call represents maximum life long wish fulfillment, and it is taking place just hours after the birth of one of my two children. So the idea that this day can be topped just beggars belief. When else am I going to arrive at a day that tops the combo of a., the birth of one of my two children and b., the sale of my first book, plus a third thing of equal measure to make it the greatest day of my life? This is not going to happen. It’s like somebody topping Johnny Vander Meer’s record of two consecutive no hitters by throwing a third consecutive no hitter. This is not going to happen. It’s an odd thing to know that you’ve already lived the greatest day of your life, but man, what a day that was.

Now after she was born, I took eight weeks paternity leave and then dropped the first episode of the Haitian Revolution in December of 2015. Now, I’ve said this many times in many places, but Haiti was a story that transformed me. It transformed my worldview. When it comes especially to my understanding of European and Atlantic history, my life has strong before the Haitian Revolution and after the Haitian Revolution vibes. Very early I was reading about the Big Whites of Saint-Domingue, these largest estate owners and major merchants of the colony and I was like, oh, I see. John Hancock and George Washington are Big Whites, aren’t they? Oh, yes they are.

But writing about events in Haiti, which were so intimately connected to events in both Europe and the Americas, is when I truly recognized the vast interconnectivity of all these revolutionary events. These revolutions I was writing about were not discrete national events, but instead one big event with several different theaters. Writing about Haiti is when I finally saw the one big revolution sloshing back and forth across the Atlantic in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. I am all on board with the Great Atlantic Revolution.

The Haitian Revolution is also the work I’m most proud of. White Europeans wrote the Haitian Revolution out of our history practically the moment after it happened. People just didn’t talk about it, they didn’t teach it. By the 20th century it wasn’t even an active act of omission, but simply one generation of scholars passing down this massive blind spot they had been told wasn’t really important or worth talking about down to the next generation of scholars.

But by the mid to late 20th century, this blind spot was being revealed, and historians of Haiti and the Caribbean have been pushing the Haitian Revolution back to where it belongs in our shared historical consciousness, as practically the only revolution worthy of the name. This process is still very much unfolding, but I can report that way more people talk about the Haitian Revolution now than when I was making these episodes back in 2015 and 2016. Now, I am not here to take credit for that, other people are far more responsible for this than I am, but to whatever small degree I have contributed to raising a bit of awareness about the Haitian Revolution, well, I count that amongst my proudest achievements.

Now by the time the last episode of the Haitian Revolution aired, we have entered the year of our lord 2016, with all that comes with it. In addition to writing the podcast, I was hard at work on this book about the disintegration of a centuries-old republic and was not thrilled by current events. There was this running joke on Twitter, where the latest piece of insane political news would break and people would write to me and say, Mike, you got to write that book faster man, and I would say, I’m writing the book as fast as I can.

I meant for The Storm Before the Storm to be vaguely prescient, that’s the vibe I was going for. I was not happy at all that the book stood in danger of being overtaken by events. But in December of 2016, I turned in the manuscript and held my breath, hoping it wouldn’t be totally obsolete by the time it finally hit the shelves.

Now throughout 2016, I was also doing Spanish American Independence, which finally ended with Simone Bolivar dying in February of 2017. The end of that season marks the end of what I’ve come to think of as Part One of the Revolution’s podcast. Part One covers the first five series, with the English Revolution serving as a little prequel, thematically foreshadowing what’s to come. With the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution and Spanish American Independence, these are all constituent parts of what’s been dubbed the Age of Revolution, or the Great Democratic Revolution or the Atlantic Revolution, this 50 year period of political upheaval after the end of the Seven Years War, driven by new ideas and new technologies and new classes of people, that redefine the nature of political power, legitimacy, and sovereignty.

This Great Democratic Revolution is tied directly to the political question that we’ve been talking about for all this time, where a combination of ancient and modern political virtues churned up in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment were given real political force. Liberal institutions like constitutions, and bills of rights, and participatory political assemblies. We have great ideals like liberty and equality. This is when republicans challenge kings, popular sovereignty challenges divine right, subjects become citizens, colonies become independent states. This period is also linked to liberalism and the rise of capitalism, the transformation of social systems and economic systems to produce bourgeois democracies, the rule of parliamentary systems controlled by the capital-owning class. All of it produced the institutions and values necessary to build the modern world, to build a world better and freer than the world that came before us.

But if that’s all that was ever needed, then there wouldn’t have been anything left to say. But there was a lot left to say, because we know it’s not that easy or clear cut. And while this revolutionary period from the 1760s to the 1820s produced good answers to the political question, it also paved the way for a society left with an even bigger question, the social question. And so Part One gives way to Part Two, when revolutionary energy passes from liberals to socialists.

The two groups were ultimately born of the same parents, liberty and equality. It’s just that liberals came to believe that with the political question answered, liberty and equality had been achieved. But socialists looked around and say, how can liberty and equality exist in a world of such tortuously destructive inequality? It’s a good question to ask. So Part two mostly gets going with the Revolutions of 1848, which are simultaneously liberal political revolutions against archaic medieval empires, but also the first time we see organized socialists and anarchists challenging the nature of capitalism and the social order. The 19th century was born of a massive cataclysmic, all-encompassing war, which gave way to a life of iron and steel and coal. The rest of the long 19th century is battles over land and mines and factories and railroads and docks. It’s no longer just about taxes and parliaments, it’s about the meaning of human dignity in societies rapidly transformed by the industrial revolution.

People have often asked me how Revolutions has changed my own beliefs, and one thing I’ll definitely say is that everything I’ve covered since 1848 has helped me emerge from a narrow-minded and parochial liberalism that was focused exclusively on the political question. I figured as long as there was a strong constitutional order, a bill of rights, the rule of law, independent courts, and citizen participation in the crafting of legislation, that that was freedom, we now have a free society. And after that, you just kind of let things run their course. Now don’t get me wrong, I always thought there needed to be rules and regulations and, like, environmental protections. But beyond that, success or failure, rising or falling, this came down to the hard work and talents and efforts of each of us as individuals.

But as I said, I now see this as narrow-minded parochial liberalism. And when I look at history and I look at current events, I just don’t feel like that’s enough anymore. I care deeply about these revolutionary concepts of liberty and equality — that hasn’t changed at all, that’s been the same throughout — but I now recognize that political rights are only the skeleton, necessary but not sufficient for a healthy body politic. We need some meat on those bones. And I think that by 1848 I was coming to not just understand that, but believe it.

Series 6 on the Revolution of 1830 sits on the dividing line between Part 1 and Part 2 of the podcast. It’s very clearly a liberal political revolution, but it also serves as a prelude to the Revolutions of 1848 and everything that comes after. But mostly what the Revolution of 1830 means to me is that it’s when the Lafayette book snapped into place. Lafayette had been all over the American Revolution and the French Revolution, and had become a living symbol of the Great Democratic Revolution. But when I got into 1830 I was shocked how big of a part Lafayette played, and then as I was doing those bonus episodes on the Carbonari of the early 1820s and then the June Rebellion of 1832, I found his name popping up over and over again. So I felt like I needed to do something to mark his death in 1834. I started working up a standalone retrospective of Lafayette’s life and career right at the same time I needed to think about what I’d like to do for a second book, just in case The Storm Before the Storm did well. The outline for that episode eventually turned into the book proposal for Hero of Two Worlds.

In October 2017, The Storm Before the Storm came out, and y’all went ahead and put it on the bestseller list for me, for which I am eternally grateful. But the thing I remember most about this period is going out on the road for the bookstore tour, and, like, finally meeting my fans for the first time. I’d been podcasting for more than a decade at that point, but never really met my listeners. I just worked and published things online. I didn’t meet people that actually listened to the show. Other than the tours, I never encountered fans of the show in real life. And I very specifically remember going into the Harvard Bookstore on pub day, not knowing if anybody was going to show up, and then being absolutely blown away by how many people were there. Now, this might sound like a humble brag — and, fair cop to that — but for the record I do want to make it clear that I am just insecure enough that I didn’t really know if I was going to be walking into an empty room. I really didn’t know.

And what I learned on that tour, and which has been confirmed to me on all subsequent tours, is that you people out there are the nicest, friendliest, smartest, funniest, and most considerate fanbase in the world. Truly, you are. And that’s not just me saying that. Wherever I go, I talk to the managers or workers after the event, and no matter where I go, they always report just how lovely everybody was, which I happen to agree with. You guys make me look so good.

Now after the success of Storm Before the Storm, we took the Lafayette pitch to the publisher. I spent a bunch of time working on this pitch that was very detailed as I earnestly made the case that Lafayette deserved a biography covering his whole life. They loved the idea, and said yes immediately, and I realized in retrospect that I probably could have just said I wanted to write a book about the French guy from the Hamilton musical, and that would have been enough, because I’m pretty sure that’s what sealed the deal.

Now before Revolutions, I never really cared about French history, or French culture, or French anything. I was always far more of an anglophile. I never studied the French language — as is obvious from my adventurous pronunciations in the French Revolution series — but as I wrote the podcast, things changed. I started getting really into French history, like really into it. So much so that among other things, the Revolutions podcast is also Mike’s general history of modern France. By the time the Lafayette book was getting approved, I was working on the series that covered the Second Empire and the Third Republic in the Paris Commune, and had left no French Revolution unturned. With this new mindset, and with an eye towards writing a book about Lafayette, I had been aggressively studying the French language for about a year, and was getting pretty good at it. Then after the Lafayette proposal sold, Mrs. Revolutions and I started talking about how I’d need to go to France to do some research. Over a series of conversations, this turned very quickly from, let’s spend a summer in Paris, to let sell everything and move to Paris, thus completing my heel turn to full blown francophile, to which I can only say, allez les bleus.

We moved to Paris in July 2018, and after a few months getting settled, I launched the series on the Mexican Revolution. As I noted at the time, it was very weird to move to Paris and then immediately start writing about events in Mexico, but I did find a bunch of really cool books on the Mexican Revolution at Centre Pompidou, so I spent months in the heart of Paris writing about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Thanks to the course I had taken at Texas State all those years ago, it was probably the Revolution I knew the most about going into the show, along with of course the American and Russian Revolutions.

Now a big unanswered question is, when did I decide Russia would be the last series? I had after all started out aiming to do 20th century revolutions like Cuba and Iran, but by the time I got to Russia, I was saying, this is it, I’m done, I’m stopping here. So when did I make this decision? Why did I make this decision? And the honest answer is, I don’t know, and I don’t really remember. My best guess is that by the time we got to France and I was working on the Mexican Revolution, I could tell that the hours were getting shorter. And at some point in there, I decided that when I got to Russia, I would just pour everything I had into it, to make it the best it could possibly be, to have it last as long as it needed to last, but that when it was over, whenever it was over, that would mean the show was over. And so that’s what I did. And that is how it came to pass that the series on the Russian Revolution lasted three calendar years.

Episode 10.1 came out in May 2019. And then I spent the rest of the year simultaneously working on the podcast and Hero of Two Worlds… except a problem developed. The weekly deadline of the podcast naturally took precedence over the much longer deadline for the book. Whatever podcast episode I happened to be working on was due right now this week, while the manuscript wasn’t due to be handed in until late 2020. This meant that when push came to shove, the book is always what got pushed and shoved. So by the end of 2019, I was like, uh, ruh roh. I am failing to do two things at once here. So I decided to carry the story of the Russian Revolution through the end of 1905, and then take six months off to finish the book. And as you might remember, this is almost precisely when COVID broke in February and March of 2020. So just as I commenced this hiatus, we entered a long lockdown period, 23 hour a day lockdowns in Paris, which is when I wrote the first third of Hero of Two Worlds. There was nothing else to do.

Now, as you also may remember, things became quite a bit more complicated for me in September 2020. Just as I was meant to be finishing the book manuscript and returning to the podcast, my right kidney revolted. It produced stones so large they could not be passed and I needed surgery. Also the manuscript wasn’t done yet. The French had also lifted the lockdown over the summer and then entered second lockdown in the fall, so I was bouncing in and out of French clinics and hospitals and pharmacies, getting COVID tests and blood tests and then twice being on an operating table. It was all quite grueling, to be honest. It was not until December 2020 that I emerged from this ordeal, manuscript finished and my health mostly restored. If you ever want to relive the fine details of all this, go check out the episode, What Happened?

But that turned out not to be the end of it. Around about late February or early March 2021, my other kidney revolted. Same deal, stones too big to pass. Only this time we had the added complication that we had plane tickets booked to return to the United States set for April 18th. This was quite an immovable date on the calendar. And unfortunately I found it impossible to convey to people how much it would not work for my initial consultation to be set just a week before I left the country for good. I was in the end saved by the father of my daughter’s best friend, who was a hand surgeon at a hospital and he heard about my plight, popped in to see his friend the urologist, who just set me up on his schedule outside of all normal channels. This I have been led to believe is a very French experience, a million bureaucratic rules and procedures that don’t matter if you know somebody.

But even here, it was absolutely down to the wire. Forty-eight hours before I was set to board an airplane to depart France for good, I was heading into a French operating room for my final procedure. This was quite a stressful weekend, let me tell you.

But there were no complications. I got fixed, we got on the plane two days later and flew home. Our three years in France lasted forever, and went by in the blink of an eye. I’d say more about it here but on my way out the door I dropped an episode called The Streets of Paris which sums up my experience far more poetically than I’d be able to muster here.

After we got back to the States in April of 2021, it was all downhill. The second half of the Russia series was well underway and aiming towards 1917 and beyond, and then in August of 2021, Hero of Two Worlds came out. It was another great success thanks to all of you out there, and the thing I’m proudest of is that you all heeded the call to throw sales to your local indie bookstores, not the website that shall not be named, so Hero of Two Worlds debuted at number one on the bestseller list for the Booksellers Association of America, which covers all those independent bookstores. That news was very sweet. But since we were still in COVID as an acute emergency, all plans for a live tour were canceled, and instead I did what felt like about a bajillion zoom interviews through the end of the year. I spent the first half of 2022 finally bringing the Russia series to a close, more than three years and 103 episodes later, pretty close to what the entire Revolutions Podcast was originally supposed to be. And I think back on that guy sitting there with a one year old on his lap in 2013, not knowing if any of this was going to work out or not, and while I’d like to go back and tell him, relax man, it’s all going to work out, he’s going to figure it out for himself eventually. Why ruin the surprise? It is, after all, a pretty good one. It worked. It all worked.

That brings us to the final phase of the Revolutions Podcast. And while it maybe would have been nice to drift easily into retirement, we elected instead for an insanely tumultuous final few months. I don’t need to remind you of what this was all about because it just happened. But the paperback for Hero of Two Worlds came out in August of 2022, and I hit the road for a long overdue live book tour. This tour took me through 14 cities in 18 days in September, and then transitioned into six more cities in October for the monologue shows. All the while I was writing up the final appendices. I traveled everywhere with my microphone, I recorded one episode in a hotel in Denver, another in a hotel in New Orleans, another in a hotel in Austin. The tour was exhilarating and exhausting. But now I’m home. The final appendix was published last week, and this final episode is almost done.

Podcasting has changed a lot since I started Revolutions — they definitely hit the mainstream long after I started the show. Back when I was doing the History of Rome, and even in the early days of Revolutions, I would tell people what I do and they would say, oh, what’s a podcast? And I would have to explain it to them: it’s like an on-demand radio show. But then as I continued on with revolutions, I got to a point where I would say, oh, I do a podcast and people would get excited and say, oh, I’ve heard of podcasts. Those are really cool. What’s yours about?

Of course, these days we’ve hit the stage where I hesitate to tell people that I’m a podcaster because people will say, oh, a podcast, everybody’s got a podcast. And when I look ahead to the future, one of my goals in life is to still be podcasting at the point when the response becomes, podcast? people are still podcasting? And I will say, yes, I am.

So does that mean there’s going to be another podcast? Well, yes, of course, there’s going to be another podcast! Over the course of my many travels and many conversations, there is one topic that far outstrips all the others, that is the question of what am I going to do next?

Mike, what are you going to do next? Please tell us what the next podcast is going to be.

And I’ve always laughed and said, ah, yes, there’s going to be another podcast, but no, I’m not telling you what it’s going to be, I’m keeping that a secret.

Well, the time for keeping secrets is over.

It’s time to tell you what I’m going to be up to next, because it is, in fact, all lined up. For a while now, the great writer, historian and presidential biographer, Alexis Coe and I have had a little mutual appreciation society thing going. A few months ago, she asked what I was doing after Revolutions, and I said I had some notions, but nothing seemed to be fitting exactly right. So we got to talking, and we got to talking about working together. And we hit upon a very simple idea, simplest idea in the world, really: we both love history. We both love books. We both love history books. We love talking about history books. We love writing history books.

And so, we are going to team up to talk about history books.

This new team of Duncan and Coe is going to talk about new history books and old history books and big history books and little history books, but that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to start a podcast where we talk about history books, these things that are so near and dear to our hearts, and which I know are very near and dear to your hearts too.

Now as soon as we started talking about this idea, I got very excited. The idea of talking with somebody of Alexis’ caliber about history books every week just seems like the best idea in the world. I, for example, absolutely have to take a break from long form narrative history podcasting — seriously, you guys, I need to rest that part of my brain for a while — and so a conversational show sounds absolutely wonderful. And besides, you guys haven’t really heard casual conversational Mike that much. Unless you hear me on somebody else’s podcast, you’re getting scripted Mike, all the time. I also have not really been able to read off-topic for like 15 years. I have had to remain laser focused on whatever the topic of that week’s show is, so I’ve just been reading Roman history books and books about the various revolutions I’ve covered for again, like, 15 years. So getting to read a variety of books on a variety of subjects is going to be a really nice change of pace. I can’t wait to read books that are not about Rome or revolutions and not feel guilty about it.

I am also beyond the stage in my career where I feel like I have to fight tooth and nail for my own place in the world. I feel like I’ve kind of carved out a place for myself in the world. And so now I would like to use that place that I’ve carved out to help other people who are fighting for their own place to find their place. I’ve spent my whole life looking up at a summit that I’ve been trying to reach. And now that I’ve kind of reached that summit, I want to look back down and help other people reach the summit too. I remember how hard it was for me in the beginning, I remember how hard it was when I published my first book, and Alexis remembers all this stuff too. And that’s the last bit of this. The thought of working with somebody like Alexis Coe is thrilling; I in fact cannot believe that she pitched me on this idea.

So there’s no official start date for this. I do need to rest. But I’m not going to rest for very long. Stay subscribed to this feed and I will let you know when the Duncan and Coe history book show starts up. It’s going to be great. I can’t wait.

Well, okay, yes, technically I can wait a little bit, but it is coming.

But that also means that Revolutions is ending. It is time to close this chapter of my life. It’s important for stories to have endings. That way new stories can begin. And there are so many stories left to tell.

Now, I did this once before when the History of Rome ended. It was a difficult decision, it was bittersweet — but it was also the right thing to do. And just as I did with the History of Rome, I’m going to drop a little donation link into the show notes for this episode. If you’ve enjoyed Revolutions and are going to miss Revolutions, and appreciated, some of those 342 episodes and 190 hours and 1.5 million words, maybe you want to drop a couple bucks in the tip jar on your way out the door. Whatever you think is fair, I think is fair too.

This show has been my life for 9 years. It means so much to me. Every word I wrote, every minute I recorded, every episode I published, they all mean the world to me. And I could not have asked for a better audience to write for. I love Revolutions very much. I love all of you very much. And so I will bid you now that fond and bittersweet adieu. But I promise that we’ll see each other on the other side….

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. You don’t ride an elevator for the music or pick an airline for the movies, so when it comes to audio entertainment, it makes sense to choose Audible. Audible has an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre, from bestsellers and new releases to celebrity memoirs, mysteries and thrillers, motivation, wellness, business and more. Audible members get full access to a growing selection including audiobooks, Audible originals and podcasts. You can download and stream all included titles you want. And now you can even listen to podcasts like, let’s say, Revolutions or the History of Rome on Audible. How awesome is that? All your favorite content is going to be on one app. It’s the home for stories told by the biggest stars like Ethan Hawke, Kerry Washington and Kevin Hart. It’s home to epic adventures, chilling mysteries, and can’t miss comedies.

Audible is the home of storytelling. So let your imagination soar with audiobooks, podcasts and originals. Let Audible help you discover new ways to laugh, be inspired or be entertained. New members can try it free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/revolutions or text REVOLUTIONS to 500-500. That’s audible.com/revolutions or text REVOLUTIONS to 500-500 to try Audible free for 30 days.

audible.com/revolutions

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well. And just so you know, Green Chef is now owned by HelloFresh and with a wide array of meal plans to choose from, there’s something for everyone. All the recipes at Green Chef are real time savers. They have pre-measured and pre-made sauces and spices and the directions are super easy to follow. And they’ll help you get the kind of flavors you expect from a restaurant at home.

Green Chef puts together meal kits fit for any diet, whether keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, Mediterranean or gluten free. They have a bunch of fast and free meals that are ready in less than 25 minutes and are all under 700 calories. This week we’re looking at a Thai red curry with chicken. It’s got bell pepper, cabbage, carrots, roasted red peppers, cashews. I know it’s going to be quick, I know it’s going to be easy, I know I won’t have to think about it that hard, and I know it’s going to be delicious.

So go to greenchef.com/revolutions135 and use code REVOLUTIONS135 to get $135 off across five boxes. And your first box ships free.

That again, go to greenchef.com/revolutions135 and use code REVOLUTIONS135 to get $135 off across five boxes, and your first box ships free.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 12: Coming Full Circle One Last Time

So this is the penultimate episode of the Revolutions Podcast. This is the last formal appendix episode and then next week I’ll have one more final informal farewell, and then, we’ll be done. I will have many heartfelt things to say next week, but to get a little head start on it, let me just say that it has been an incredible honor to produce this show, an incredible honor that a bunch of people let me do what I do here. And that if I look back over all the episodes I’ve produced and all the time we’ve spent together, that maybe the Revolutions Podcast has shaped the world for the better, or at least made your world a little bit better, as you mow the lawn and go for a walk and wash dishes and commute to work — all the things that people do when they listen to the Revolutions Podcast. Thanks for letting me spend that time with you. I’ll miss you too.

Now we’ve been talking about discrete historical events and eras and epochs that despite their differences about where and when they happened, we can call them all revolutionary events. With apologies to those of you who believe that the revolution never ended, whichever revolution it happens to be you’re talking about, we do tend to put conceptual brackets around our historical revolutions and say, here is when it began, and here is when it ended.

Now, there’s often not a right answer to figuring out when a revolution ends. If the French Revolution explodes in 1789, we can say that it goes to 1794, 1799, 1804, or 1815. All of these are acceptable endpoints to mark a book or a documentary or a podcast focused on the French Revolution. I said the French Revolution ended in 1799 partly because my daughter was about to be born and I needed to wrap up the season on the French Revolution. She’s um, seven now, in case you’re wondering how long we’ve been at this together. But in the end, whatever date we slap on to the end of a revolution, we should say that at a certain point the revolution does end. And so I want to start today by looking back at each of our ten seasons and nailing down when precisely we say each of the revolutions ended.

Now the revolutionary period in Britain and Ireland runs through 1660 and it is easily marked by the collapse of the Commonwealth and the restoration of the Stuart Monarchy. And this is one of our revolutions that really does seem to look like a revolution, one full turn of the wheel. Now if we mark this period beginning with the Bishops’ War of 1639, we are talking about 21 years of revolutionary upheaval in the British Isles. And then of course there’s the necessary coda that it would all be recapitulated in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution, when Dutch bankers staged a hostile takeover of the British Crown. But for our purposes, 1639 to 1660 is the revolutionary period.

Now the American Revolution marks its end at 1789 with the implementation of the Constitution. We could say that the revolution proper actually ended with the Treaty of Paris, and that the Articles of Confederation period was actually the first chapter of post-revolutionary American history, a chapter that was quickly closed by some radical centralists who locked themselves in a room in Philadelphia and drafted an entirely new system of government even though nobody told them to. But there is so much force around the notion that the permanence of the Constitution means that the Constitution must end the revolutionary period. So if we say this all got going with the Stamp Act in 1764, we’ve got ourselves in America a good clean 25 years of revolution.

Now I don’t want to belabor the point about the French Revolution because it will sprout volumes of words, but the French Revolution can go through 1794, 1799, 1804 or 1815, and it’s really just choose your fighter. But the tumults that opened in 1789 do seem like they must be extended conceptually out to 1815, and that like, the Revolution in Britain and Ireland, it ends with the restoration of the monarchy that was ousted in the first place. So if we take the French Revolution and extend it to the restoration of the Bourbons, it took 23 years for the revolution to come full circle.

Now the Haitian Revolution goes until the Declaration of Independence on New Year’s Day 1804. After this we enter the period where local leaders like Henri Christophe and Dessaline organized stable post-independence political regimes — or at least they tried to. Dessaline promulgated the Declaration of Independence 12 and a half years after the Bois Caïman ceremony. The revolutionary period in Haiti would have ended with the War of Knives in 1799, about eight years after Bois Caïman, but Napoleon’s attempt to reinstate slavery in San-Domingue kept the revolutionary period going and led indirectly to Louverture’s capture and death. But with Independence Day 1804, we say the Haitian Revolution closes.

Now Spanish-American Independence has the same dynamic as Anglo-American independence, with the various declarations of independence coming in the middle of the process, declarations that are often retrofitted to serve as the beginning or the end of the revolutionary period, but mostly which just kind of appeared in the middle of it and were only truly recognized after the fact. Most Spanish-American holdings declared independence in the 1810s or 1820s and then fought wars against Spain and each other to carve up South America into the chunks we more or less recognize today. And because we’re talking here about a bunch of different countries spread out over an entire continent, divided by sometimes impassable terrain, marking the boundaries of the Spanish-American independence era is always going to be a bit vague. But if we start it with the Abdications of Bayonne in 1808, we can say that it ends really once and finally for all in 1833 with the death of King Charles VII, but really by the mid to late 1820s, Spain was recognizing, at least tacitly, the independence of its former South American colonies. So we’re talking about a period of perhaps 10, 15, or 25 years, depending on where you want to mark the boundaries, still, a very long time.

Now in contrast to this, we get the French Revolution of 1830, which was lightning compared to everything that had gone before it. I mean, we call it the July Revolution for a reason, it’s obviously over in a matter of days. Although I have heard it recently posited, by me, that the June Rebellion of 1832 is actually a second wave of the Revolution of 1830. But even if we stretch the definition of the Revolution of 1832 to its breaking point, we are still talking about something that was over in about two years, not a giant generation’s long upheaval — although we will say more about this in a second.

The Revolutions of 1848 are also much more compact in time, but remember the Revolutions of 1848 start in 1847 and last until 1849. The result was the reestablishment of various dynasties on neo-absolutist terms in Austria, Hungary, and the various states of Germany. In Italy, it marked a brief pause in the wars between the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia and Austria for control of Italy. In France, the revolution moved quickly through the brief and dirty history of the Second French Republic, which takes them to the doorstep of Napoleon III, who was there to complete the farcical recapitulation of 1789 to 1794 to 1799. The revolutions of 1848 lasted for about 18 months total from the opening events in late 1847 to their closing events in early 1849. Now the revolutionary events surrounding the fall of the Second French Empire and the birth of the Third French Republic mostly ends with the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, but it takes its final form with the Constitution of 1875, which we didn’t actually talk much about in the show because it wasn’t pertinent to our revolutions, Bloody Week had already happened.

The French Third Republic was the first sovereign regime to last more than 18 years since the Fall of the Bastille in 1789. Now as you know from the show, because we did talk about this, had the Bourbon heir to the throne been willing to serve under the tricolor, the events of 1870, 1871 would have resulted in a constitutional monarchy for France, but he wouldn’t, and so it didn’t. And one suspects that it also probably just preempted the inevitable third overthrow of the Bourbons, which I feel like was all but guaranteed. So we’re talking here about six months of revolutionary activity from the fall of 1870 to the spring of 1871, an event which I also think closes a thing we might call the Long French Revolution.

The Mexican Revolution is also tricky to mark the end of, because like France and as we’re about to see with Russia, there is no dramatic endpoint. Things just shift and evolve. In Mexican presidential history, it just sort of drifts from Carranza to Obregon to the PRI as armies demobilize, normal life resumes, and legends of the revolution like Villa and Zapata are assassinated. Now it does feel like the revolutionary process might run all the way through the presidency of Cárdenas because the radical economic and social possibilities of the revolution were not seized on until Cárdenas in the 1930s. But the revolution by that point already feels like a historical event, so it’s easier to say that it lasted from the election of 1910 to the election of 1920, a decade of winds sweeping Mexico.

Now like the revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution of 1905 starts in 1904 and does not end until 1906. And also like 1848, it ends with the re-entrenchment of the imperial dynasty on neo-absolutist terms. The tsar now recognizes a duma and other certain types of public assemblies like the Zemstvo. This obviously rickety settlement does not last through World War I, and so in February 1917 we get this second revolution. It’s possible to say the revolution ended in November 1917, with the immediate survival of the Bolshevik regime after the October Days. Maybe you want to push it to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 — I’m not going to argue with you — but I personally think that the Russian Revolution runs at a minimum through the end of the Civil War. It’s only after the Civil War that the Communist regime is actually on stable footing. Then, with the coming USSR, it moves out of the revolutionary phase, a phase that lasts five, six, or seven years depending on how you want to do the math.

So now that we’ve grasped the scope of all of these revolutions, we can start to compare how it started with how it’s going. Maybe haul back up our definition of what a political revolution is and make sure everything we’ve been talking about here qualifies, and if it does qualify, how exactly does it qualify? So we said that a political revolution is when the existing structure of political power — how power is exercised, justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure and replaced by something different. So, do our revolutions qualify as political revolutions? Spoiler alert, of course they do, otherwise I would not have been talking about them.

So the revolutionary upheavals in Britain and Ireland had begun as a part of a long process of negotiation between the crowns of Britain and the lords of Britain. They’re fighting over issues that go back to the Norman Conquest, you know, through the medieval period, Magna Carta, into the age of the Tudors, the Wars of Religion, and the consolidation of something like a stable central monarchical apparatus. This gave way to a cousin from Scotland, who was himself the product of negotiated settlements between all of those groups and then also between the Scottish and the English. But the great question of the day was really whether or not a parliament, an assembly of stakeholders of the realm, would be a permanent part of statecraft. And the answer was unequivocally yes: Britain would be a constitutional and parliamentary monarchy. Everything that happened between 1639 and 1660 guarantees this. When James II later tried to undo this very settled fact, it was him that went, not the wallpaper. So even though we might say that the Stuart Restoration means that it was all a big hullabaloo over nothing, no, no, no. The British monarchy of Charles II was very different than the British monarchy of Charles I.

Now it should be very obvious how the American Revolution changed the nature of its sovereign because we’re talking about a colony that was now independent. So right there, the seat of sovereignty and justifications for that sovereignty are going to be different. In this case, the seat of sovereignty has moved across an entire ocean. The new citizens of America also had to find new terms to justify their fledgling commonwealth, with no deep historical tradition to point to anymore, nor any divine will of god, they instead pledged fealty to a piece of paper that they wrote a week ago last Tuesday, which is admittedly very curious behavior. But obviously the United States is now a republic and not a monarchy, and that’s actually a pretty revolutionary outcome, so the American Revolution was absolutely a political revolution.

If we take the French Revolution all the way through the fall of Napoleon in 1815, we must look at how the restored bourbon monarchy was organized. When Louis XVIII was restored to power, he did not believe he could get away without ruling with a charter of government that at least mimicked a constitution. There were guarantees for elected assemblies, balanced ministries, and basic individual rights. And I think there’s a real sense that just as with the English Revolution and the American Revolution, was, is there going to be a parliament, some permanent assembly of at least some part of the population who would now participate in government? Now, typically, at this point in history, this parliament is going to be full of the wealthiest members of that society, and they tend to resemble oligarchies far more than democracies. But still, the disequilibrium that caused the revolutions were in part caused by the sovereign refusing to allow even that much. So a vital component of any stable equilibrium was the permanent recognition of a popular assembly. So all of these revolutions, one of the main things they do is produce parliamentary structures.

But moving on from that, we can look at Haiti and find another very easy case to analyze. The Haitian Revolution started with a slave colony administered by some rich stakeholders and colonial officials, and it ended with a full-fledged independent state run by the slaves who had freed themselves. I actually cannot imagine a more dramatic revolutionary change. We don’t have to talk about it much because it’s so huge and so obvious.

Now, again, Spanish American independence is a lot like Anglo-American independence: there was once a colonial regime of intendants who were in charge of things, but now all the various states of South America are independent and answerable to no one beyond their own territories. So each of them will break into different sorts of constitutional or personalist regimes, there are usually running battles between liberals and conservatives inside each of the newly independent nations, and coups and revolts in civil wars and foreign wars will continue unabated for another hundred years. But in the immediate aftermath of the wars of Spanish American independence, the regimes of South America were being run in entirely different ways than they were before the process of Spanish American independence, especially because they too are all now republics.

Now the Revolution of 1830 is a very subtle shift. And as I’ve said previously, the Revolution of 1830 might actually be even more conservative than the American Revolution. But it does take Louis XVIII’s Charter of Government that was pointing to God and saying that’s where sovereignty comes from, and flips that around and says, no, no, no, sovereignty comes from the people. The new Charter of Government that was revised in 1830 recognized the people as the ultimate authority, not God, and the terms of the Charter were made far more legally binding on the king and every other party involved than had been going on under Charles X. But 1830 is also mostly just a blip in the long French Revolution.

1848 was of course a year of mostly failed revolution, so most of the post-1848 regimes were just the dynasties restored to power. But even in triumph, the regimes had been altered. Post-1848 neo-absolutism allowed for measures of electoral participation in carefully managed assemblies. The majority peasant population of all these kingdoms and empires could be reliably turned out to support the regime politically, as one of the great weaknesses of the radical democrats inside Vienna or Budapest or Prague or Berlin was how small their numbers were. The vast majority of the population in all these places was still rural and poor, not urban and upwardly mobile, so they voted conservative. But it is unlikely that even these compromises and concessions would have arrived absent the shock of the revolution. So 1848 absolutely changed the regimes where they happened. In France, 1848 ultimately produced the second empire, which fell apart in September of 1870. This might have been another motor point to the long French Revolution, with the Third Republic following its predecessor, the Second Republic, and just giving way to some successor state after it had outlived its usefulness to the political factions involved, whether they be legitimists or Orléanists or Bonapartists or radical democrats or socialists. But instead the Third Republic just kept lurching forward and even persisted through World War I, which is quite a feat when you really think about it.

Now in Mexico, comparing 1910 to 1920 actually produces some stark similarities. The presidency of Porfirio Díaz and the presidency of the many faces of the PRI have very similar political monopolies over a nominally democratic system. The PRI also winds up having some technocratic post-scientifico influences that scan a lot like the group that was surrounding Díaz in his latter days. But there were also major progressive advances inside the Mexican Constitution of 1917, especially about social guarantees, the right to an education and sweeping anti-Catholic legislation that did have a major impact on property, social, and cultural relations in Mexico, where the church had once loomed so large and was now dispossessed and barely tolerated.

Now comparing and contrasting the Bolshevik-Communist state that followed the tsarist regime is also pretty simple, they are very, very different things. And although you can kind of unfocus your eyes and see, yes, authoritarian police state, authoritarian police state, and let’s just call these things the same thing, the regime of Tsar Nicholas II and Stalinist Russia were absolutely not the same thing. A major political revolution had happened.

Now in each of these cases, the new regime was able to answer some of the questions the old regime could not. Mostly, this turns out to be a question of the extent to which other stakeholders in the realm would be allowed to participate in the crafting of laws, taxation, and spending. Feudal arrangements that were based on contractual mutual obligation and spheres of influence gave way to a modernizing state that was more all-encompassing in its grasp, ambitions, and organizational worldview. This disrupted the former contractual bonds between sovereign and subject, so the powerful interests of these various states sought new modes of retaining a degree of influence and power. This is why parliaments arise, because they become an assembly of those interests. And the population of the ruling class was subtly shifting away from the old medieval houses and towards these rising bourgeois houses as modern capitalism set out to conquer the world.

So as we can see, all of our revolutions have been political revolutions. But only some of our revolutions were also social revolutions. Now remember, we said a social revolution is when the economic relations and or cultural hierarchies of a society — their personnel, rationalizations, habits, norms, obligations, and modes of production — are rapidly transformed such that the society is organized in a fundamentally different manner. About half our revolutions don’t really come with a massive reorganization of economic relations and cultural hierarchies. They simply continue a line of socioeconomic development largely unbroken by the revolutionary period. It’s not hard to look at the American economy before, during, and after the American Revolution, and recognize that it’s not like the founders took a sledgehammer to the economic relations that had made them also wealthy and influential in the first place. In the realm of economic and social relations, there was no break or overthrow of the past in America. But we can contrast this with the Russian Revolution, where the Bolshevik Party undertook the massive reorganization of huge parts of the Russian economy with dramatic results. Say what you will about collectivization, it was quite a radical break from the past.

Now following on that, one of the great changes that comes to these greater revolutions, the social revolutions, is in land ownership. Places like France, Haiti, Mexico, and Russia all come with mass confiscation of land by revolutionary and post-revolutionary authorities, particularly the largest of states of the most conservative defenders of the ancien regime, and, inevitably, the church, whether it’s Catholic or Orthodox. There’s also quite a bit of land churn during the British revolutions, which Charles II wisely left for Parliament to figure out after the restoration. When Louis XVIII came to power, he faced the question of those national lands, the stuff that had been confiscated and then resold at auction to people in good faith, and he decided he didn’t want to touch any of it with a ten-foot pole. His brother Charles X would have restored all former owners to their lost property, but the verdict of the revolution was too strong at that point. He couldn’t undo it. The land churn remained.

But aside from these material changes, I think we can also talk about changes in cultural attitudes and mentalities, changes in psychology caused by the revolution. I’m thinking specifically here about something I read at the end of the Mexican Revolution. It was a quote from an old Hacienda manager noting the change in the attitude of the peasants, that even as things settled back down and appeared to return to normal, that there were things you simply couldn’t do anymore, ways you couldn’t talk to the peasants anymore, that the revolution had, like, bathed the population in the waters of self-respect. This is also something I find for French peasants and workers and tradesmen and sailors and soldiers after the French Revolution. It stamped a certain insolent egalitarianism on them all. There was much less tolerance for things like natural superiority or natural inferiority. And all this is especially true if education and literacy are one of the results of the revolution. A better educated population naturally thinks differently about itself. We know this.

Now, anything that involves a lot of trauma and instability and bloodshed and threats to basic survival are, of course, going to impact how people think about themselves and think about the world. But it’s also the case that many of these revolutions take place over decades, like over an entire generation, and we do need to control for the fact that human society can simply change over time, whether there was a revolution or not. Now for example, we can talk about economic changes before, during, and after a revolution and ask ourselves whether any of this was the result of the revolution, or simply the changing nature of an economic system at a time of great theoretical and technological innovation. The Witte Boom happened under the tsars, after all. Napoleon III and Porfirio Diaz inaugurated and oversaw economic leaps forward far more dramatic than anything produced by the revolutions that preceded them and followed them.

Which brings us to the last big question I want to talk about here: was the revolution worth it? What were its benefits? What were its costs? We can compare and contrast the beginning and end of the revolutionary process and then ask if the middle bits were really necessary. Whether the ends justify the means. Whether the means were the only means of achieving these ends. And to be specific here, what we’re talking about here is basically all the deaths, the injury, the trauma, the dislocation, and the destruction that comes with revolution and war. But since any prolonged period of human history is going to involve a lot of death, injury, trauma, dislocation, and destruction, we can only fairly talk about the excess casualties caused by the revolution. Was the revolutionary result worth the price paid in all those extra dead?

A corollary to this question is whether the revolution was even a necessary event at all to achieve the final outcome. What would have happened had there been no revolution? What changes can be identified and attributed to the revolution and the revolution alone? Was the revolution necessary to get from point A to point B? One might look at the Restoration Settlements of 1815 and the nearly unfathomable suffering and devastation unleashed by the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars and wonder if maybe so paltry an end maybe doesn’t justify the enormous cost.

But these are not questions that I am going to have good permanent answers for, because they are questions that everybody is going to have to answer for themselves in their own way. In terms of hypotheticals, we can look and say, well, there is always a scenario where better leaders, smarter leaders would have done the compromises necessary to avoid revolution and arrive at a conclusion that very much looks like the result of the revolution without the revolution having ever taken place. I mean, wouldn’t it maybe have been better for everyone and less traumatic and destructive and bloody if Louis XVI had simply issued a charter of government in 1789? Sure, absolutely.

So we can always conjure a hypothetical where we say, no, the revolution was not worth it because if they had just done X, Y and Z, they could have avoided the revolution. But they didn’t know what X, Y and Z was at the time. And most importantly, we don’t get to redo history with a new set of leaders. Our leaders were great idiots, and so they blew it. But there are other times where it’s even difficult to see a hypothetical, where the leaders who were present in the ancien regime managed to produce the revolutionary settlement without a revolution. And I am thinking here specifically of the Haitian Revolution. Can you imagine a world where it’s possible for the major merchants and landowners and stakeholders in San-Domingue, right, the Big Whites, to willingly abolish slavery, pick up and leave the island and give full control of it over to the black population? Absent a revolution, I really don’t see that happening. No amount of hypothetical enlightened self-interest is going to lead that group of people to make those choices, at least not in that time or that place. So we can say, well, wouldn’t it have been better if the French had just said, you know what, slavery is wrong, let’s withdraw from the colony and allow our former slaves to create an independent republic for themselves? Well, yeah, sure, that would have been better. But the question is, could you have gotten from point A to point B without a violent revolutionary upheaval in San-Domingue in the 1790s?

Now, one can point to other constituent parts of the French Empire and the Caribbean, or if you want, the British or Dutch or Spanish. Those places often wind up with the result of the abolition of slavery and independence for the polity in question without necessitating a revolution, as we witnessed in San Domain. And so maybe you want to say, well, those places did it without a revolution, to which we might say yes, but absent the experience of the Haitian Revolution, do those other imperial powers make the same choices they do about divesting themselves from slavery? And then more to the point: was it in fact better to make all those slaves wait another 30, 40 or 50 years just because we think it might have been better for their freedom to have come without a bloody revolution?

Because ultimately, there is a moral component to all of this, where we have to set aside questions of efficacy and practicality, and more in terms of what is morally justified or not. If a person is held in slavery against their will, are they not allowed to commit maximum violence in order to free themselves from their bondage? This is to say that the crime of enslavement is so morally intolerable, and so fundamentally anathema to the human condition, that you can’t morally rule out any tool a slave might use to free themselves. This includes killing their master, killing their master’s family, killing the master’s society. How could anyone possibly complain about this? They were a bunch of slavers. And what would you say to these slaves rising up? Oh, no wait, hang on, your masters will eventually get around to freeing you. Well, maybe not you, maybe your grandchildren, but you get my point. I mean, how do you ask the last person to be a slave for just a little while longer after you’ve decided that slavery is a horrendous evil that must be abolished?

But that said, there are other times, of course, where none of that pertains. And when you look at the grievances of the British North American colonists or South American Criollo elite, the Big Whites of Haiti we were just talking about, or what about events in Mexico or events in all these various regimes in France through the 19th century? Was the violence and destruction that accompanied lurches forward politically and socially really vital? Couldn’t these changes have come without everyone breaking into armed violent camps? I mean, we often see societies change and transform over time. Land changes hand, economic modes are altered, attitudes change. I mean, if you just let a society go for another 20, 30, or 40 years, when you check back in, it’s going to be different than it was 20, 30, or 40 years earlier. Violent revolution is hardly the only thing that changes human behavior.

It has been suggested to me that what I should do after the Revolutions podcast is maybe start a podcast called Reforms, where we just talk about all the really boring, mundane ways that societies have progressed and transformed without resorting to violent upheaval. That if you compare and contrast, say, the British and the French, we find that today they have very similar political rights and economic systems and modern social relations, but they took very different paths to get here. The British traveled the same tumultuous revolutionary times as the rest of Europe and mostly navigated the waters by a series of calculated concessions and compromises. They didn’t feel the heat of 1848 because political reform bills had cleaved the interest of the middle class from the working class. In places where 1848 did start to pose a real revolutionary threat, we also see a bunch of sovereigns eagerly capitulating to demands for reform. The crowned heads of places like the Netherlands and Belgium and Denmark and parts of Scandinavia all very quickly signed on to constitutional reforms. That’s why most of them are still monarchies today. So if they accomplish the same thing using reform instead of revolution, is revolution really this vital component? Maybe, maybe not.

I think that there is something to the notion that all the chaos on the continent caused by the French Revolution did impact British decision making; that with the great example of the French Revolution staring in the face, the leaders of Britain kept coming back to the idea that maybe it would be better to just avoid all of that. Make a few requisite concessions and then get on with the business of getting on with it.

Now even after all these years I do not ultimately have great answers to these great questions. No two people can ever look back on the history of revolutions with the same pair of eyes. Certainly I can tell you from all the emails and messages I’ve gotten over the years, that different people take exactly the same set of podcast episodes and draw wildly different conclusions from them. Some people write in to talk about how revolutions appear to be the worst possible idea that humans have ever had, while others write in and ask me for the best specifications of a good barricade. Mostly I just think it’s my job to present you with all of the information, to tell you what happened, and then leave it to you, my fine listeners, to figure out what to do with all this information.

But there’s not going to be much information left, is there? Next week will be the final episode of the Revolutions Podcast. It will be a fond and bittersweet adieu to a show that has consumed my life for the last nine years, and will at least partly define my life forever — I mean I’m pretty sure it’s at least in the first couple sentences of any obituary that gets written about me, even if I live another forty years. And that’s not a bad thing. I’m very proud of this show. It means a lot to me. And I’m glad that it’s meant a lot to you too.

So let’s all get together next week one more time to say goodbye.

 

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. Well, it’s that time of year again, the time when you discover great gift ideas by listening to the opening advertisements of your favorite podcasts, and I am not here to disappoint those of you who are scrambling for gift ideas because Trade Coffee is a great gift idea. It really is. You can give it, you can ask for it. Trade Coffee is a coffee subscription service that delivers fresh coffee right to your doorstep, according to your drinking needs. And one of the best things about it is the variety of coffees that you’ll get over the course of the year. Trade makes it easy and convenient to discover new coffees you never would’ve otherwise heard of. Over the past year and a half or so, I’ve had cups of coffee from all over the country, all of them have been great and all small businesses I can feel great about supporting.

So right now, Trade is offering our listeners a total of $30 off of subscriptions, and access to limited time holiday specials at drinktrade.com/revolutions.

That’s drinktrade.com/revolutions for $30 off.

drinktrade.com/revolutions.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Harry’s. There are many different things to consider when buying the perfect gift, how useful it is, how cool it is, whether it’s something that can only be used once or if it’s something that keeps on giving. The Harry’s holiday gift box ticks a lot of boxes for not a lot of money. The people at Harry’s were good enough to send me a gift box, and I think it would be the perfect gift for anybody out there, and not just the guys in your life, but also the women, because women also use razors. I can happily endorse the quality of the shave. I’ve been using it for years, and I’ve got no complaints whatsoever.

So the Harry’s holiday gift box comes with all the things you’ve come to expect from hearing me talk about Harry’s for all these years, but it’s wrapped up in a lovely little gift box, nice enough to go right under the tree without any additional wrapping required.

So check all the guys off your list with a Harry’s starter set. First time buyers, get a $13 value for just $3 at harrys.com/revolutions. And check out Harry’s gift boxes, but act fast. These offers are for a limited time with a limited stock at harrys.com/revolutions.

 

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Better Help. It would be nice if life came with an owner’s manual, something we could use as a reference guide when things start to go haywire. Oh, there’s a problem, let me just flip to that section of the owner’s manual and see, ah, yes, it seems as if I need to apologize. Or maybe it says, no, wait, I’m the victim here. I deserve an apology. Stranger things have happened. But even though that’s not actually how any of this works, therapy is the next best thing to an owner’s manual. Therapy helps us frame and talk through the problems of our lives so that we can figure out exactly how to handle the latest batch of issues that have cropped up.

As the world’s largest therapy service. Better Help has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists. Available a hundred percent online, plus it’s affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with the therapist. If things aren’t clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime. It couldn’t be simpler. There’s no waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right.

So learn more and save 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/revolutions. That’s betterhelp.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 11: Meet the new Boss

The working premise of these appendices is that we can take a bunch of unique historical events that are mostly defined by their own time, place, and context, and tease out some similarities; to observe how these revolutions progress through certain common steps; to catch the places where history seems to be rhyming.

But as we moved into appendices 9 and 10 to discuss a specific stage of conflict between moderates and radicals, we have been drifting a bit from universal application. Not all revolutions become defined by a conflict between moderates and radicals: the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Spanish American revolutions, don’t really express themselves in these terms. Sure, we could take the model and go looking for things in those revolutions that fit the mold, but they’re not gonna fit that well or that convincingly. So as we wrap up these appendices, we should always keep in mind that if we find uncomfortable tension between an abstract model of history and the particular details of a historical event, or if factual relations need to be ever so carefully stretched or framed to fit a template, my advice is to let go of the template. Always, always err on the side of letting the historical facts speak for themselves in their own way and on their own terms.

That said, we do return in this appendix to something that does seem to happen at the end of all revolutions — well, nearly all revolutions, not all of them. Never all of them. But most of them. It’s actually one of the most common observations about the universality of certain revolutionary events: that they seem to invariably reach a stage where political power and authority coalesces around the magnetic personality of a single charismatic leader. That what started as a vast, multi-faceted, multi-faced, multi-party, multi-interest, all-encompassing revolutionary mass movement aimed at the overthrow of the ancien regime has splintered, via the entropy of victory, will ultimately give way to a powerful leader commanding unique authority, who will use their power to settle all accounts, tie up old threads, and often conveniently give name and face to the transition from revolutionary to post-revolutionary era.

And whatever the specific causes, twists and turns, and courses of whichever revolution we are talking about, it is undeniable and practically axiomatic that a revolutionary period involves an enormous amount of chaos, uncertainty, and insecurity for the population of whatever society we’re talking about. This honestly doesn’t need much of a further explanation, because… it’s a revolution. It’s gonna be chaotic. The old political order has literally been thrown out and people are scrambling to erect something new in its place. In the interim, there’s gonna be a lot of confusion. During that process, different political groups will set up rival claims to power, and one group will say, we are the new power, pay attention to us, not those other guys over there. And those other guys over there are saying, no, we’re the new power. Pay attention to us. Lines of authority get very scrambled. Nobody knows who’s in charge or how long they’ll last. And in the revolutions we’ve been talking about, this is often accompanied by a great deal of combative violence. There could be riots or street fighting, there are often full-blown wars. For the average person living through a revolution, stress and confusion are likely the dominant emotions.

Now, along with this prevailing political chaos, revolutions also cause enormous amounts of economic dislocation. Supply lines are disrupted, trade lines are cut, goods become scarce, money becomes inflated, maybe even worthless. There’s no stability or predictability. You can’t really count on anything. You go to the same bakery you’ve always gone to and there’s no bread to be had. You go to sell your grain at the market and nobody has anything to pay you. Workers and laborers are conscripted into armies, and there’s not enough hands for field or factory. Output plummets, transportation networks are destroyed or impassable. With old economic relations torn asunder amidst war and revolution, just trying to put food on the table becomes a dicey proposition. The struggle for survival often becomes a daily, even hourly challenge with no certainty whatsoever that tomorrow will bring anything different.

Revolutions also come with a breakdown of law and order. Now, the old system of law and order may have been worth overthrowing, just as the old modes of economic and political relations may have been worth overthrowing, but it means that in the aftermath of a revolution, the legal system is going to be a bit of a dysfunctional mess, and it’s very easy for unsavory characters to get away with things. Nearly every revolution we’ve covered has been accompanied by a spike in criminal behavior — and I’m here just talking about regular old crimes, theft, fraud, extortion, kidnapping, assault, rape, and murder. The rise in banditry and what we would call today gang activity rises amidst economic uncertainty and the breakdown of old systems of legal justice.

All of this chaos naturally produces a kind of general exhaustion in the population. A revolution is above all an exhausting proposition, not just for those participating in it, but for those who are essentially on the sidelines. Stress and uncertainty wear us down. We become very tired, tired physically, tired psychologically, tired emotionally. The longer it goes on, the more the exhaustion prevails, and like a kind of low grade torture, invites us to sign on to anything the torturer puts in front of us to just make the torture stop. And in a revolutionary setting, that torture becomes defined by ongoing and never settled factional civil wars, that can provoke from a normal person, the sense that, uh, my god, I’m sick to death of all of you people, just settle things so we can get on with our lives.

So the number of people who are stressed and exhausted and absolutely over it in society rises as the revolution progresses. Remember, we started with the masses all pouring out into the streets in this first revolutionary wave, to overthrow an ancien regime that had itself become so exhaustingly and frustratingly and provocatively irritating that it just had to go. But as conflicts open up within the revolutionary coalition, and individuals and groups and parties get tossed aside, the people who supported those individuals or groups or parties drop out of politics. They quit, they leave, they run, they hide. And those who are winning the revolution very much prefer it this way. They’re happy to purge and discourage and prohibit people who disagree with them from participating in politics because, look, they’re trying to organize a new legitimacy, and dissenting voices will mess all that up. So as the stakes rise, the willingness to tolerate dissent inside the revolutionary regime shrinks, and people wind up unable to muster the energy to fight on. What they want is some semblance of order, and revolution often takes them to the point where they are willing to accept order in whatever form it takes, whether they actually like it or not.

The point I’m trying to make here is that human beings have a tendency to prefer living with something resembling security, regularity, safety. This is one of those primordial instincts that goes with the territory of being a mammal in nature. We prefer to go back to the same place for food, and find that there’s food there. We prefer it when we can go to the same place we found water last time, and find that there’s water there again. We prefer to be able to go to sleep at night and not be attacked by predators or rival groups while we sleep. And to be honest, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s stressful to live in chaos and people would prefer to live with less stress and fear if they can get away with it. The fact is most normal people endure the revolution as passive and helpless spectators. Most people are not obsessed with politics. Most people don’t even care about politics, or if they do get interested, they get quickly fed up. And day by day, the promise of order and regularity becomes very alluring.

And so if a single leader out there starts to make a name for themselves, and that name begins to promise order and stability and an end to the chaos, a lot of people are willing to listen. And even those who are still idealistic true believers and don’t necessarily believe that the order promised will be worth the price, well, they look around and despair that the people probably don’t have any fight left in them. So even if a leader rises up without much cheering, they may rise with something a leader likes just as much, and that’s exhausted resignation.

But let’s be clear, it’s not like the leaders we’re gonna talk about here rolled in and said, oh, aren’t you sick of all the chaos and disorder, hand all power to me, I’ll make everything better. No, it usually happens far more subtly and organically than that, but the implication is always there. However, the revolutionary path twists and turns and rises and falls and ebbs and flows, it takes us to this place: some charismatic leaders accruing more and more political power with less and less resistance.

Usually the rise of this leader comes as they personally win over the loyalty of a large section of the armed population — by which I mean, an army. And resistance dissolves, not necessarily from a feeling of oh gee whiz, I’d rather go about my business and not pay attention to politics anymore, but more, oh, that guy commands such an overwhelming amount of violent force that it would be suicidal to try to challenge them. And so the revolution that started with the many becomes the one.

So who are we talking about specifically here? Well, if you’ve paid any attention at all to the podcast, you can probably name each individual I am about to discuss off the top of your head. Because they wound up as the great charismatic leader defining the end game of their particular revolution, we had to talk about them a lot. So none of these names should be unfamiliar, most of them should be right on the tip of your tongue.

So who are we talking about in the English Revolution? It’s obviously Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell rises up through the ranks of the Parliamentary Army, becomes a key figure in the New Model Army, is a forceful leader inside the particular faction looking to turn the kingdom into a commonwealth, give it a written constitution, and an orderly republican form of government. The problem, of course, as you might remember from those episodes, is that as Cromwell tried to produce these written constitutions and new structures of government, people just kept not doing what they were supposed to do. The good lord protector, elevated to maintain security in the realm and act as an executive inside of a new constitutional order, kept finding the other branches not behaving the way they were supposed to behave, and so he had to keep dismissing them, improvising a new approach, and finding out that those new ways also didn’t work. And so in exasperation, Cromwell would blow them up. Appointed lord protector for life, Cromwell ruled from 1653 until his death in 1658. Now it’s true he kept refusing to wear the crown, and he never stopped trying to get a power sharing system in place, but as the Rump Parliament and the Bare Bones parliament and the Rule of the Major-Generals came and went, the one thing that stayed was Cromwell, indisputably holding power to the end.

Now, as you may have noticed, the American Revolution tends to miss a lot of these beats in the latter stages of the revolution, but it was still an incredibly chaotic event, and obviously there’s only one man who fits the bill here, and that’s George Washington. Washington is the central, indisputable leader of the American Revolution. He’s the indispensable man. Never authoritarian, but always authoritative. It’s true he got dragged kicking and screaming to be the first president of the United States, but it’s very telling that everybody told him he had to do it, and that the absence of his presence would make the whole project fall apart. The presidency was a uniquely powerful executive institution at the time. Both head of government and head of state. It was designed specifically for Washington, but Washington is a different breed of cat here. He defied human nature and instead of ruling for life, retired. But the revolution does revolve around Washington, doesn’t it? And it resolves to Washington, doesn’t it? He’s not a dictator, he never was a dictator, but had he been born of a slightly different cloth, King George the First of America was absolutely on the table. It remains utterly remarkable that he wouldn’t take what nearly every other man in his position would have — or at least, every other person we’re talking about here today would have. And even though he’s not a dictator, the American Revolution absolutely ended with a single charismatic leader in charge.

Now, when we get to the French Revolution, you know, the only person we could be talking about here is Napoleon Bonaparte. Like so many things about the French Revolution, Bonaparte is the prototypical example of all this. Bonaparte seized power in a nearly fumbled coup in 1799, and then set about deliberately consolidating power after the Directory had discredited itself with chicanery, hijinks, and corruption. Bonaparte’s power only grew as he continued to fight wars with the rest of Europe, won those wars, the result of which being European conquest revitalizing the French economy. This made him very popular. He then set about trying to reconcile French society, and he invited back the old tossed out bits, the the old aristocracy and the Catholic church, and he built up a personalist empire that by the time he unveiled it, no one could stop him.

In Haiti, things obviously revolve around Toussaint Louverture. And where does he come from? Ah, yes, just like the first three, he’s a great military leader who was winning battles on the field, that’s a bit of a theme here. In the beginning, Louverture was merely one player in a much larger game, but by the mid 1790s, he had consolidated power by successfully playing external opponents like the French, British, Spanish, and Americans, and internal opponents like Andre Rigaud. Commanding the largest and most powerful army on an island ravaged by chaos and war, there was no political entity to transfer power to even had Louverture wanted. Him and his army were it. And so wherever Louverture was, that’s where political power was. He spent a good five or six years as a dictator, calling the shots as he tried to mold his tricolor society that would be built on the back of plantation cash crops. But eventually, even those closest to him in the upper rungs of the Haitian military apparatus decided that what Louverture wanted was not necessarily what they wanted, so they betrayed him and allowed him to be arrested by the French, and he wound up dying in captivity.

So who’s next? Well, of course, it’s Simone Bolivar.

Bolivar is the only one of our group who actually assumed the literal title of dictator. Although those of you from the good old history of Rome days know that a dictator in the context of the Roman Republic was not the unseemly anathema of free goverment, but was instead a vital emergency tool that was used by a free republic at a time of crisis. Bolivar, a lot like Cromwell and Washington, but not like Bonaparte or Louverture, was forever thinking he would be able to set down his dictatorial authority and hand power to some kind of representative government founded on the rule of law, et cetera, et cetera. But Bolivar could never find people willing to do it in exactly the way he wanted them to do it, and so because of that, he had to keep brushing them aside and reinstalling himself as dictator well after the point when everybody actually wanted him to go away. But when Bolivar was in the room, nobody could say no to him.

Now the Revolution of 1830 is maybe, even more than the American Revolution, is probably the most conservative of all the revolutions we’ve talked about. The leader on the white horse who comes riding in to restore order in July of 1830 is… Louis-Philippe. Louis-Philippe may have been conservative and he may have reigned over a smallish electorate, but it’s not like he was ever anything resembling a dictator in any meaningful sense of that word. There was a charter of government in place, there was a legislative branch with an upper house and a lower house, there were judges and laws, and Louis-Philippe knew exactly the role that he had been cast in. Both publicly and privately, he tried to rule as a constitutional monarch bound by certain constraints. I mean, that’s why they had overthrown Charles X in the first place. So the revolution of 1830 does not really fit the mold here.

Now most of the revolutions of 1848 also don’t really fit the mold because most of them failed. And we wind up with neo-absolutist monarchists coming back into power. When they came back into power, they tended to have a few more rules about what they could and could not do, but it was far more of a restoration than a revolution. In France specifically, though, the Second Republic managed to last for about three years before another Bonaparte decided he wanted to be another Napoleon. The justifications for Napoleon III were roughly the same: everything is so chaotic, the leaders around me are wildly unpopular with most people, so I’ll just self-coup my way into power. Napoleon III’s legitimacy and charismatic authority came exclusively from the fact of his name, that’s it, he had nothing else to recommend him for any job. He was in this sense a lot like Octavian from the History of Rome days trotting around the name of Caesar without having done anything to actually earn it.

Now, like the revolution of 1830, the French Third Republican Paris Commune era also do not really resolve towards a dictatorial outcome. It’s very possible that the Paris Commune would have gone towards a dictator had their charismatic dictator been around, and there is somebody who would’ve fit the mold. It’s August Blanqui, the man who was born to play that role, but he had already been arrested and locked up, and so he wasn’t there for the Paris Commune, so they did committee rule until the end.

Meanwhile, for the French Third Republic, it maybe could have gone towards a dictatorship, but instead there was just enough multiplicity of interest without a single charismatic figure on any side that everyone wound up crammed into a very tense and uneasy republic that nobody loved, but everyone was willing to tolerate, at least until the next revolutionary turn of the screw. Except that didn’t really happen. The French Third Republic lasted until World War II, and after that it’s, here comes Charles de Gaulle, who absolutely fits the bill here, but it’s like 75 years later.

Now in Mexico. Carranza very much wanted to play the role of the charismatic dictator after Madera, but the man had no charisma. He was so deeply unpopular, even among his own subordinates, and he could point to no military or political track record that he could lay claim to popular power. Meanwhile, the people who did have that track record in charisma, people like Villa and Zapata, had different agendas, and they didn’t really want the job, so as the Mexican Revolution progressed, it progressed to Alvaro Obregon and the crew from Sonora. So in the Mexican context, Obregon is playing this role here. He’s got the military accolades, the legend of his one arm, and his astute politicking. But with no reelection being such a huge part of the Mexican Revolution, Obregon gave way to a successor, and from there, the PRI developed itself into a unique system where the party became the dictator rather than any single man.

And then finally in the Russian Revolution, you know who we’re talking about, we’re talking about Lenin and then Stalin, about whom we have just spent about a gazillion years talking about, and whose careers likely don’t need much of a rehearsing here. But obviously, post-February Revolution Russian democracy didn’t even last the year before it was back to a single leader calling the shots — and yes, they technically did this while adhering to the byzantine ethics of Party Committee rules, but still ,be real. Everybody knows they were dictators.

So let’s make some observations. First, where does the authority of so many of these guys come from? It’s simple. It’s military victory. Look at these names: General Cromwell, General Washington, General Bonaparte, General Louverture, General Bolivar, General Obregon. They all made their name as military men. So what is it about generals that so many of these individual leaders who define the end game of a revolution come from the military?

Well, let’s start by not overthinking it. Sovereign power is all about holding a preponderance of force over your society, we’ve talked about this at length. And if you are a military leader who has developed a loyal army, well that’s kind of the ballgame, isn’t it? Because who can possibly stand against you, but another army. And these guys were all successful, not just in combating foreign threats, but more importantly, they had very likely just won a civil war. And so at that point, there’s quite literally no army that can stand against them, that army was just defeated. But also just in terms of the cult of personality type influence that’s necessary to go along with these kind of rulers, military victory is a great way to have your name and face spread far and wide, either by word of mouth or in newspapers or radio broadcasts. For that kind of mass reach, you need to be doing something that affects all of society, be involved in something that all of society cares about. The course of a war is one of those things that everybody is gonna be talking about, and so the victorious leader in one side of this war is gonna get talked about a lot. And if they are victorious, they are gonna be talked about in positive terms. The military, of course, also functions as a hierarchy, with a commander-in-chief at the very top, and so it’s practically built for personalist rule. When all the other institutions of society have fallen apart, the army structure transfers very nicely into the political arena, which necessarily involves one person at the very top giving orders.

Now with Lenin and Stalin, we have a unique situation among our dictators as they commanded their authority as political operators, not military generals. The military men who tried to become dictators, people like Kornilov, or Denikin or Kolchak, were all Whites, they weren’t Reds. Now, Trotsky ultimately derived some of his personal authority from his successful organization of the Red Army, but he was a civilian hand guiding the ship, not General Trotsky, Commander-in-Chief, and he got out flanked and booted out of the revolution anyway. But though Lenin and Stalin derived their authority from their ability to manipulate political parties rather than their charismatic authority as military leaders, it is worth remembering that both of them were acutely aware that they couldn’t have charismatic military heroes running around out there challenging their authority. They had to guard against such figures emerging, and they did, constantly. And we know what happened as a result when World War II got started.

Now, the second thing we can observe here is that almost none of these leaders explicitly set out on a road to be a dictator. It is something that developed organically over the course of the revolution, and developed from their own experiences with politics during this period. Cromwell didn’t start out by saying, oh, I’m gonna start as a member of the landed gentry, but when I’m done, I’ll be lord protector. George Washington didn’t really want to be a political leader at all. He kept trying to get out of that job in a way that I think transcends mere showmanship. Napoleon was an ambitious young man, but he was improvising all along the way, I don’t think Emperor Napoleon was his plan from the start. Absent the Mexican Revolution, Alvaro Obregon is just out there in the north raising chickpeas. But revolution did come and war came with it, and a mix of frustration and duty and opportunity and ego convinced each of these men that they must for the good of society, take power and reign supreme. But in almost all of these cases, it feels like something that they arrived at in the due course of time, not something that they laid out as a goal for themselves at the start of the revolution.

A third thing we can observe comes directly from that thought, but which needs fuller expression, and that is the bit about ego. For a variety of reasons, our leaders have come to regard their own judgments and decisions and choices as vital to the health and wellbeing of their society. That to remove themselves from the situation would be to doom society to a return to chaos. When we look at people like Bolivar and Cromwell basically concluding that everyone around them is doing it wrong, and therefore I must remain so that the good and right thing must be done, we can ask what their motivation is here. Because not doing it how I want it done is not necessarily the same as not doing it right, unless you’ve got a rather large ego. To reach the point where dictatorial power is even a possibility, you have to be something of an egomaniac. Even Washington, with his supernatural aversion to dictatorial power, was an egomaniac. Of course he was. You can’t spend any time around the guy and not conclude that, at least compared to a normal person. You don’t have the kinds of careers these people have without an unreasonable amount of ambition and an unhealthy level of self regard. It’s very abnormal, and their egos are doing a lot of the work of convincing them that they have to stay in power at all costs, otherwise it’s catastrophic, not just for them as individuals, but for society as a whole.

Now, fourth thing we can observe is that our charismatic authority figures are always operating out of something resembling a middle ground. Now, they’re naturally gonna be to the right of the most left wing radical elements of any revolution, but they’re always also gonna be much further to the left than any right wing element. Whatever else these people are, they’re not restorationists or reactionaries or conservatives. They’re all revolutionary leaders, who often continue to do revolutionary things, even as they pull in a more conservative direction. Cromwell was a Republican, but he’s not a Leveler or a Digger. Washington tended to be a Centralist and a Federalist, but is clearly trying to balance the interests of everyone in the American revolutionary coalition. I mean, he went off and put down a proto-populist uprising in the west, clearly prioritizing order over liberty, but he’s also not trying to create a monarchy in America. Bonaparte tried to reconcile the Revolution with traditional French society, inviting back conservatives and cutting deals with the Catholic church and restoring slavery in the colonies, but even in full dictator mode, he was doing progressive things that the Revolution wanted done. Educational and bureaucratic and legal reform that the more technocratic side of the enlightenment always wanted, a side that had always called for this, being delivered by an enlightened dictator, naturally. And even Lenin and Stalin who come to power from a radical left flank of the Russian Revolution had left wing critics that they put down in their rise to power, Left Communists and anarchists and Left SRs. Anyone who would’ve preferred more bottom up styles of authority and less top down styles of authority? They had to go.

And that brings me to the last observation I wanna make, which will lead into what we’re gonna talk about next week, is that in all of these cases — with the real exception of Louis-Philippe — all of our charismatic authority figures wind up wielding more power and have a greater reach than whatever ruler was in place prior to the revolution. If you look at the military resources and financial resources available to them, the size of the bureaucracy out there doing their bidding, the breadth and depth that they can expect their laws and decrees to be enforced throughout society, we always find a very big jump in the power of the executive. From what King Charles was able to do to what Oliver Cromwell was able to do. Crown and Parliament and the North American colonies versus President Washington in the United States. Louis XVI versus Emperor Napoleon. The French Colonial Administration of Saint-Domingue vs Toussaint Louverture. The Spanish Colonial Administration of South America versus Simone Bolivar. Louis-Philippe versus Napoleon III. Porfirio Díaz versus the PRI. And finally, Tsar Nicholas against Lenin and Stalin. You would be extremely hard pressed to make the case that the former’s political authority exceeded the latter’s. Revolutions don’t just produce dictators, they produce powerful dictators.

And that will segue us nicely into what we’re gonna talk about next week in our final appendix. We will take a large sweeping look back from the end of the revolution to the beginning of the revolution. When we look back, we will ask, what happened? What changed? Was it worth it? What did these revolutions accomplish? Are revolutions horrendous nightmares to be avoided at all costs, or are they vital lurches forward to be cherished and celebrated?

This final appendix will be the second to last episode of the Revolutions Podcast, and so we will wrap up the appendices by wrapping up our revolutions, and then the week after that will be the final episode of Revolutions, when I bid all of you a bittersweet adieu.

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. You don’t ride an elevator for the music or pick an airline for the movies, so when it comes to audio entertainment, it makes sense to choose Audible. It’s the home for stories told by the biggest stars like Ethan Hawke, Kerry Washington, and Kevin Hart. It’s home to epic adventures, chilling mysteries, and can’t miss comedies. Audible is the home of storytelling. Let your imagination soar with audiobooks, podcasts, and originals. Audible has an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre. From bestsellers to new releases to celebrity memoirs, mysteries and thrillers, members get full access to a growing selection including audiobooks, Audible originals, and podcasts. You can download and stream all the included titles if you want, and now you can even listen to, let’s say, Revolutions and The History of Rome on Audible. How cool was that? All your favorite content on one app.

Let Audible help you discover new ways to laugh, be inspired, or be entertained. New members can try it free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/revolutions or text REVOLUTIONS to 500-500. That’s audible.com/revolutions or text REVOLUTIONS to 500-500 to try Audible free for 30 days.

audible.com/revolutions

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Harry’s. There are lots of different things to consider when purchasing the perfect gift, how cool it is, how useful it is, whether it’s something that can only be used once or as a gift that keeps on giving. The Harry’s holiday gift box is all of these things: it’s cool, it’s useful, and you can use it all year round. The people at Harry’s were kind enough to send me a holiday gift box, and I think it would be the perfect gift for anybody out there, not just the guys in your life.

But what about the ladies? It’s not like they don’t use razors too. I can always happily endorse the quality of the shape, but these new holiday gift boxes are great. They include things that you’ve come to expect from hearing me talk about Harry’s all these years, and all of it wrapped up in a lovely little gift box, nice enough to go right to the recipient without any additional wrapping required. I’d be personally happy to give someone a Harry’s gift box and perfectly happy to receive one.

So check off all the guys on your list with a Harry’s starter set. First time buyers get a $13 value for just $3 at harrys.com/revolutions, and check out Harry’s gift boxes — but act fast. These offers are for a limited time with limited stock at harrys.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 10 – The Revolution Devours Its Children

Well, we all knew this one was coming eventually: the point in the revolution when a small clique of radical fanatics who seize control of the government in the second wave of the revolution embark on a reign of terror to purge the enemies of the revolution. At the moment of maximum crisis, surrounded by enemies on all sides, they turn to firing squads and guillotines and chopping blocks to ruthlessly eliminate all perceived threats. And as the radical clique now in charge of the government is inevitably composed of a teeny tiny minority of the population, the vast majority of the population might find itself plausibly targeted as enemies of the revolution. Not just conservatives, reactionaries, and restorationists, but anyone deemed insufficiently enthusiastic about the radical program, or who have ever so slightly different opinions about what that revolutionary program should be about. And this includes, of course, those who helped make the revolution in the first place, the leaders of that first wave, like the hapless moderates, so recently overthrown in our second wave. So we have reached the phase when our revolution begins to devour its children.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t always go like that. Not all revolutions wind up at a reign of terror phase; in fact, most of them don’t. It seems like they do, because the two biggest, most famous and most influential revolutions — the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution — both progressed to a phase of terror. And since we take those to be our model revolutions, we think that all revolutions must progress to a phase of terror. But as we discussed last time, that radical second wave challenge to the moderates fails as often as it succeeds. So oftentimes there are no radicals in power to launch such a reign of terror. And as we know, moderates would never dream of using excessive violence to cement their control amidst revolutionary chaos.

Oh wait, of course they would.

So even though plenty of revolutions do not wind up at a radical reign of terror phase, they nearly all wind up at a point when top-down violence by the revolutionary government is deployed against its own people. We don’t have a dramatic name, such as “reign of terror” for top-down violence committed by moderate revolutionary regimes, so I’m gonna take a page from a different period of French history to give that a name. Let’s call them bloody weeks, after the infamous suppression of the Paris Commune — because here too, the revolution is devouring its children.

So what I wanna do today is go through both kinds of top-down revolutionary violence, both reigns of terror and bloody weeks. Establish the who, what, when, where, why, and how of both types of revolutionary child-devouring, and mark out how they are different — because they are different — but also notice how they are very much the same.

Let’s start with the “what” question, as in: what are we even talking about here? So let’s define our terms. A reign of terror is when a revolutionary government, captured by a radical faction, uses the power of the state to carry out a campaign of political violence. It involves an intrusive mechanism of surveillance, encouragement of citizen mutual denunciation, mass arrests, flimsy rules of evidence, and often, though not always, concludes with summary execution. The ultimate goal of a reign of terror being the liquidation of perceived enemies of the revolution, and a final consolidation of power by those in power.

This is in contrast to a bloody week, when a revolutionary government, successfully defended by the moderate leaders against the radicals, uses the power of the state to carry out a campaign of political violence against the defeated radicals. It involves the declaration of martial law, mass indiscriminate arrest, and often though not always concludes with summary executions, the ultimate goal being the liquidation of perceived enemies of the revolution, and a final consolidation of power by those in power.

So as you can see, these are different, but they are also the same. The particular political sins being rooted out and punished are obviously gonna be different varieties whether the violence is perpetrated by radicals or moderates, but in both cases, we are looking at top-down state violence perpetrated against its own people for the purpose of defending the political power of the perpetrators.

So let’s move next to the when question, as in: when do reigns of terror happen, when do bloody weeks happen? Well, in both cases, they obviously happen after the contest between moderates and radicals has been decided. We also obviously need to have advanced to the point in the wider revolutionary event where an ongoing existential crisis has created emergency conditions that seems to justify the harshest possible measures, measures that in other cases would be considered beyond the pale. The question of when this happens is when we find our revolutionary leaders exhausted, stressed out, and afraid. They need to be deeply fearful and not a little bit paranoid of what will happen if their rivals win, so they cannot allow their rivals to win. We don’t find reigns of terror or bloody weeks happening after the initial first wave of revolution. In the honeymoon period that follows that first wave, everyone is excited about the limitless possibilities of the revolution, and that isn’t exactly fertile ground for a reign of terror or a bloody week, because the prevailing emotional vibe is hope, optimism, and unity, rather than fear, bitterness, and division.

So now let’s move on to a bigger question of who. And the who question has two aspects: who perpetrates the reign of terror or bloody week, and who are the victims of a reign of terror or a bloody week. Now I wanna set aside the latter aspect for a moment to focus on the former. Who is doing this? And we already know part of the answer because of the inherent distinction between reigns of terror and bloody weeks. Reigns of terror are perpetrated by radicals, bloody weeks by moderates. But the who is doing this question also involves the wider personnel carrying out the project, because it’s obviously not gonna be enough for uncompromising leaders of some executive committee or provisional government to order mass arrests and executions without anyone to carry out the orders. So we must also note here that in both cases, there’s gonna be a loyal apparatus of police and military and lawyers and judges who do the actual rounding up, arresting, arraigning, sentencing, and carrying out of the sentences. These people must have some kind of ideological motivation for not just going along with all this, but actively and eagerly partipating.

So we can give the reign of terror a name and a face like Robespierre, and we can give a bloody week the name and face of Adolphe Thiers, but absent thousands of willing subordinates and collaborators, it’s never gonna happen. Carrying out a vast project of political violence is a team effort.

And before we go on, I also wanna mention here that everything we’re talking about here today is distinct from white terrors. A white terror is perpetrated by reactionaries, conservatives, and restorationists, that’s a whole separate can of worms. What we’re talking about here today is still revolutionary on revolutionary violence, because the revolution is eating its children.

Now, I wanna briefly set aside the other big who question — who are the victims — because that question will make a lot more sense after we’ve talked about the why question. Why embark on political massacres, what’s the point? This isn’t something you just haul off and do on a whim. Even fanatics have justifications beyond just a mindless thirst for blood. Mindless thirst for blood is actually a far rarer condition than one might suppose; even historical actors with the most blood on their hands can point to a thing they were trying to accomplish that somehow necessitated all that blood.

So let’s start with the reigns of terror. For reigns of terror, I see five broad categories that have shown up historically, all of which are mutually reinforcing, and so we’re gonna talk about these in no particular order.

But first, we have a thing called winning the war. Why have a reign of terror? Because we need to win the war. What war? Well, whatever war the regime happens to be fighting at the time. In both Russia and France, the perpetrators of revolutionary terror, whether Jacobin or Red, were waging both civil wars and foreign wars. The very existence of the revolution seemed to hang in the balance — it did hang in the balance. It wasn’t even irrational paranoia that led them to see spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists trying to undermine them from within who needed to be purged, spies and saboteurs and fifth columnists were absolutely trying to undermine them from within! They probably did need to be purged. And with victory or defeat in the field determining the whole fate of the revolution, the revolution’s own soldiers and officers needed to display iron discipline. If anyone slacked off or failed in their duty, it wasn’t just a mistake, it was treason. So the implementation of terror was justified by its leaders as a vital response to the exigencies of war.

Second, related to the exigencies of war, was economic mobilization and the marshaling of resources by the state. Among those most frequently targeted by revolutionary terror were not just political partisans or foreign enemies, but something else. Hoarders, speculators, profiteers, people who were undermining the revolutions’ economic mobilization. People who refused to hand over grain or sell at a price below what they thought reasonable. People who would not give up their tools or their livestock or their fodder to some passing army or political agents. If a revolution comes under radical control, there’s also usually an amount of confiscation and redistribution of land going on, and anybody who opposes that is often gonna find themselves on the wrong side of a machine gun or a guillotine.

Now, in those economic cases, we’re often dealing with people motivated by economic self-interest rather than political ideology. So to turn to our third point is the necessity of clearing out those rival political factions and parties, the people who are driven by political ideology. This is the liquidation of the Girondins, the trial of the SRs. It’s very important to paint these rival groups as totally illegitimate, so as to not challenge the hegemony of those radicals who have seized power, whether it’s the Mountain or the Bolsheviks. It’s vital for the radicals who, as we have noted, are a very small group, to identify themselves one to one with the greater revolutionary struggle. No other group can be allowed to have a legitimate claim to the revolution, and anyone who does is liable to find themselves on the wrong side of a machine gun or a guillotine.

Now, this relates to the fourth point, which is that the regime must eventually establish its own preponderance of force over the society. That’s the whole basis of political sovereignty. The first wave of the revolution broke the ancien regime’s claim, but eventually the post-revolutionary chaos is going to have to give way to something resembling a new order. If the radicals won their contest with the moderates, then obviously the moderates were unable to establish such a preponderance of force for themselves. And as the radicals take over in a hostile, dangerous, and chaotic time, they need to bring down some kind of violent hammer to establish that we are now sovereign, and the way that you know that we’re sovereign is that we can lock you up or kill you whenever we want A reign of terrors, that’s partly about making society well and truly afraid of challenging them. That’s what sovereignty’s all about.

Fifth and finally, a reign of terror has its own ideological logic, outside immediate threats to the power of the radicals, whether it’s real or perceived. The reign of terror is an extension of the radical’s willingness to liquidate and destroy old institutions, and start their revolutionary society off with a clean slate. Defenders and beneficiaries of the old ways can and should be cleared out ruthlessly, so that a good and pure new society can be built. And because they are radical, that list includes not just people actively conservative or reactionary, but anyone insufficiently committed to new beginnings.

So broadly speaking, those are the justifications for reigns of terror. They answer the question, why do we need to have a reign of terror? And it’s not that we have to accept those justifications, it’s just that those are the justifications the radicals themselves believe.

Now bloody weeks, on the other hand, have subtly different justifications. To follow up from that last point about the desire to start new and destroy everything old, the top-down state repression that goes along with a good bloody week is the other side of that coin. They must arrest and deport and confiscate and kill not to ensure a year zero fresh start, but to prevent a year zero fresh start. Moderates, as we’ve defined them, often love a good political revolution, but they hate the possibility of a social revolution, and they’re absolutely willing to kill to prevent the world from being turned upside down. In fact, they’re perfectly willing to compromise and reconcile with many parts of ancien regime society, but unwilling to compromise with the most radical wing of their own revolutionary coalition. So it’s pardons for conservatives and firing squads for radicals.

But the principle justification for a bloody week is order. Where a reign of terror is tied to the continuing advance of the revolution, bloody weeks are all about restoring order. The radical challenge and further extracurricular activities by revolutionaries out there must be declared out of bounce for all time. And so, the radicals who keep challenging and pressing the new modern regime are condemned for their criminal behavior, for their rioting, their disturbing of the peace, destruction of property, and treason. The justification for a brutal smackdown on the radical wing of the revolutionary coalition rests on the need to restore order.

But just like a reign of terror, this restoration of order is about establishing the moderate regime holds a preponderance of force and a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. The time has come for people to stop taking up arms, stop manning barricades, and stop with all these irregular solutions to their political problems. The moderate regime that’s in charge right now is in charge. You are playing by our rules, and if you don’t like it, there will be fatal consequences.

And this is related to the same kind of clearing out of political rivalries that we see in a reign of terror. The moderates need to poison the legitimacy of the radicals to make sure that whatever standing they once had amongst the people is destroyed. And as much as we think that such behavior is only the purview of a radical, moderates can get up to some pretty shady business in the interest of preserving their own position against ideological rivals. Radical leaders claiming to represent a better, truer, or less compromised version of the revolution must be swept off the table. The people must not be allowed to hear their alternatives to the moderates. And if they suggest that revolutionary solutions are the answers to their problems, there must be fatal consequences.

So, now that we have a sense of the whys, we can return to the second part of the who question: who are the victims? Because the question, why are we doing this, sets the stage for, who are we doing it to? So let’s talk about who winds up a victim of a reign of terror.

These terrors, of course, involve famous names like kings and queens and high princes: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the Romanov family. And this is usually the most common popular understanding of what a reign of terror is — it’s the people rising up and dispatching once and for all the hated benefactors of the former regime, ruthlessly killing the blood-sucking parasites who had been rightly overthrown by the revolution. But when you actually go through the numbers and the list of victims, we find that those people generally make up a small minority of the victims. Aristocrats are not the most common victims of a reign of terror, for a very simple reason that by the time the revolution has reached the reign of terror phase, most of those original benefactors of the ancien regime like the old nobility have fled into exile. They are beyond the reach of the revolution. Most of the French aristocracy had taken up residents elsewhere by the time the reign of terror came along, same is true the old Russian nobility. So if they’re not around to get killed, who is getting killed?

Well, obviously we should talk about the fact that a lot of people getting killed are revolutionary leaders, who were simply rivals for power of those who now happen to be in charge. This is Jacques Pierre Brissot and the Girondins against Robespierre and the Mountain. This is the leadership of the SRs against Lenin and the Bolsheviks. This is where the colloquialism about the revolution eating its children comes from: it’s the Girondins talking about the Mountain. And most especially, it applies to those overthrown moderates now rebranded as reactionaries. Jean-Sylvain Bailly, who stood at the center of the Oath of the Tennis Court, was then hauled out to the Champ de Mars to get his head chopped off for crimes against the revolution, most especially, the massacre of the Champ de Mars. We have the Duc d’Orléans, turned Philippe Égalité, whose ambitions and money had played such a huge role in 1787 and 1788 and 1789 eventually executed for treason. They didn’t give him so much as a thank you note.

I should also add at this point that revolutionary terrorists are not directing their terror solely from the left against everyone to their right. What we actually find them doing is creating their own new middle, and launching themselves against their right wing, yes, but also against their left wing. So, obviously, many people caught up in the terror are caught up because they’re conservatives or because they’re moderates, but others are caught up in the terror because they are too radical and too extreme. The terror is coming from a new center of gravity.

So in Russia, for example, we could talk about Left-Communists and SR Maximalists and anarchists, who were targeted by the Bolsheviks, along with liberals and Whites for the same reason: that their activities were undermining the unity of the revolution at a time of foreign and civil war. When Robespierre launched the Great Terror in 1794, who did he target before he even got to the Cordeliers gang? Left wing Hébertists, who were actually more radical than the members of the Committee of Public Safety.

So beyond ideological rivals, we often find a good number of foreigners being targeted in all of this. It is typically a very dangerous thing to be a foreigner inside of a revolutionary event, because though you might find temporary excited encouragement, and a universality of fellow feeling early in the revolution, this is often eventually gonna be met by a paranoid style of revolutionary nationalism, where you now might be identified with enemies of the revolution because of your foreign connections. Revolutions are very dicey times for even the most apolitical of expatriots.

But most of the victims? Most of the victims are simply poor, anonymous commoners — peasants, workers, lower class randos who run a foul of the regime in one way or another, or who simply live in an area that happens to be in a state of acute unrest, and the government decides to order in some infernal columns. The official tally of the official Reign of Terror is packed with victims from Vendée, for example, whether they were engaged in the uprising or simply picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Those who are subject to such summary executions, whether by drowning, hanging, cannon fire, guillotine, or machine gun, their names escape our notice because they were nobodies. For every execution of a famous celebrity historical figure, there are hundreds or thousands of executions of unknown commoners. Partly, this can be the result of ratcheting up draconian capital punishment for the simplest of crimes. Lots of victims of the French Reign of Terror were like pick pockets and thieves, people who had just broken the law. If you think about the September Massacres, which were a prelude to the official Reign of Terror, something like half the people who were killed were not aristocrats or enemies of the revolution at all, but people simply being held for having committed some regular old crime.

A bloody week, meanwhile, tends to be a little bit more focused than all of that. It’s less about a prolonged period of repression hitting out multiple directions at once and more about a brief and sharp blow against the radical wing of the revolutionary coalition. And it is hitting out especially against those who have recently attempted to take up arms against the government in the second wave of the revolution. So after the June Rebellion of 1832, or the June Days of 1848, or the suppression of the Paris Commune, or like after the Spartacist Revolt in Germany, the victims tend to be politically radical. They are targeted for trying to move the revolution beyond whatever center the moderates have tried to establish, and unlike a reign of terror is not accompanied by a similar attack against conservatives, reactionaries, and restorationists, unless some group of them also attempted to stage some kind of violent counter-revolution.

In terms of economic class and social standing, the victims of a bloody week tend to come from the lower middle classes and lower classes, so students, artisans, rank and file soldiers and sailors, possibly a few professionals and intellectuals if they got a little too enthusiastic about the radical second wave of a revolution. But unlike a reign of terror, which can find a number of rich, or at least formerly rich aristocrats, as well as lots of comfortable ladies and gentlemen, the victims of the bloody week are gonna be coming from the poorer districts. Which doesn’t exactly set bloody weeks apart from reigns of terror, since reigns of terror also involve lots of lower class victims, but those victims do seem to come exclusively from the lower classes, and that is different.

Now finally we come to the question of how they did it. What are the mechanisms and procedures undertaken by the who — who are perpetrating top-down state violence, and the who — who are the victims of that top-down state violence?

Well, when it comes to the reign of terror, the mechanism is usually some kind of revolutionary tribunal, to at least give a nominal appearance of revolutionary justice. Now, during the French Revolution, revolutionary tribunals were set up to do more than just give the appearance of justice, and there were rules of evidence. But when the law of suspects came down, those rules were suspended and we get to infamous kangaroo court style tribunals. Evidence no longer really matters, accusation carries all before it. So even as there are judges and prosecutors and defendants all playing their parts, the verdict is predetermined, and with ruthless efficiency, the accused are turned into the executed.

But for the most part, the reign of terror likes to keep up the appearance of legality, especially when it comes to trying people who are in the dock for political reasons. People were not hauled before the revolutionary tribunal merely for their political leanings; the accusation was not we disagree with you politically. The accusations, for example, against Danton and Desmoulins were that they were involved in a corrupt self dealing scandal with a certain state owned company, which they had nothing to do with, but it’s not like the Committee of Public [Safety] was just saying, oh, these people pose a political threat to our power, so they must be dispatched with. It was far more that they were corrupt, that they were profiting from the revolution at the expense of the people.

One of the most common accusations we find are “collaboration with foreign enemies,” no matter how spurious or absurd the charge. And so for example, as with Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, you have inner circle Communists admitting that they colluded with the imperialist capitalists to overthrow the revolution. Even if such accusations are literally unbelievable, it is necessary to establish them so as to discredit these leaders, which is, as I said, one of the key goals of a reign of terror: to make sure that the party in power is recognized as the only legitimate representative of the revolution. So you don’t accuse them of supporting the wrong political policies, you accuse them of colluding with enemies of the state.

Now bloody weeks can use the same kind of legal procedures, and though there is certainly quite a bit more fidelity to objective facts and following something like the rule of law in bloody week procedures, there is still something very perfunctory and summary about the nature of the justice being dispensed. Since mass arrests and processing of detainees unfolds quickly and sometimes haphazardly, and it just really doesn’t matter if somebody who’s really innocent gets found guilty. But that said, there is some attempt to limit the harshest penalties to those who were, for example, caught with arms in hand, or who were recognized as the leaders of some insurrection. In these cases, the crimes don’t necessarily have to be manufactured because the bloody week is taking place in the aftermath of a failed revolutionary challenge to the government, and it’s much easier in that case to accuse and prosecute somebody for participation in a failed coup when they are caught with a gun in their.

But it is worth pointing out that those who are rounded up and tried by a moderate regime’s courts and subsequently sentenced to detention or deportation or execution are there after a period when martial law had been declared, and plenty of people who surrendered or laid down their arms were not arrested and processed according to the regular rules of law, but instead came under the immediate jurisdiction of military officers operating under that martial law. And so before the polite niceties of an organized criminal court come into play, many radical leaders and followers find themselves summarily shot on site rather than being processed at all. The vast majority of those killed in action during the Bloody Week were not killed during an exchange of fire, but in summary executions in the street after surrendering or being arrested.

Now, there are plenty of differences between reigns of terror and bloody weeks. A bloody week does tend to be of shorter duration, and more limited in scope, and more limited in who it’s targeting. A reign of terror tends to go on for longer and be a more all-encompassing blanket over society. Now, it’s difficult, given conflicting historical evidence, to know for sure who counts as a victim in a reign of terror or a bloody week, and what the final numbers for such activities actually were. But it also seems that a reign of terror often involves more suspects, more defendants, and more execution than a bloody week will. A bloody week also has a tendency to directly hit a group that has recently attempted to stage some kind of insurrectionary coup d’etat, and so it falls under the purview of a sovereign regime defending itself from an illegal revolt, as opposed to a reign of terror, which is more ideologically driven and is attempting to use their violence to establish entirely new political, economic, and social norms among other things.

So I have not come here to say that reigns of terror and bloody weeks are morally and politically equivalent. But they are both expressions of the same moment in a revolution, when the revolutionary regime uses the power of the state in murderously violent ways in an attempt to establish their permanent ascendancy over the society in question. And more importantly, that these murderously violent acts are committed against other factions of the original revolutionary coalition. In both cases, this is the revolution devouring its children, and that is something that does seem to inevitably occur in every revolution.

So we are approaching the end of this final project of appendices to the Revolutions Podcast. We’ve gone through many stages, and one of the key through lines from beginning to end is that chaos has prevailed. Old political and legal structures no longer have the force that they once did. The society engulfed in revolution grapples with almost continuous uncertainty and insecurity. Violence and criminality rise. Disorder seems to reign.

And so next week, as we approach the final stages of both revolution and the Revolutions Podcast, we will talk about why it is that at the end of every revolution, we always seem to meet a revolutionary dictator.

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Better Help. It would be nice if life came with an owner’s manual, something comprehensive we could use as reference and guidance when things start to go haywire. Oh, no problem, we could say, let me just flip to that section of the owner’s manual, and see, oh yeah, I’m at fault, better apologize, or, wait, no, actually, I’m the victim here and deserve an apology. But even though that’s not how any of this works, therapy is the next best thing to an owner’s manual. Therapy helps us frame and talk through the problems in our lives so we can figure out exactly how to handle the latest batch of issues that have cropped up. As the world’s largest therapy service, Better Help has matched three million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists, available a hundred percent online. Plus, it’s affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist. If things aren’t clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime. Couldn’t be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist.

Learn more and save 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/revolutions. That’s betterhelp.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 9: The Second Wave

As we’ve discussed over the last two appendices, when the first great revolutionary wave recedes, inherent divisions among the revolutionaries emerge. Those who find themselves in charge of the post-revolutionary government struggle to maintain cohesion. The disequilibrium of the later stages of the ancien regime finds its counterpart in the disequilibrium of the early stages of the revolutionary regime. Things are still extremely fraught and nothing at all is settled. The revolutionaries turned responsible agents of government must improvise on the fly a new set of political arrangements that will hopefully allow equilibrium to return to the society they’ve seized control of.

And this is no easy task, because all the chaos balls bouncing around the later stages of the ancien regime are still bouncing around in the early stages of the revolutionary regime. Plus, there are almost certainly shooting wars breaking out on multiple fronts. Achieving stability is an incredibly difficult task, and occasionally it’s impossible.

Now we know that divisions among the revolutionaries can open up on many fronts — religious, geographic, economic, and social class — but one of the most dependable splits is along temperamental and ideological lines. This is a split between moderates and radicals.

Radicals cheered on the first revolutionary wave and now want it to advance further, in bigger and bolder directions. Moderates cheered on the first revolutionary wave and now want to consolidate a few minimal gains before risking anything more, if indeed they even want to risk anything more. Chances are they are satisfied with the minimum gains and don’t want the revolution to advance further at all. It usually happens that as the early stage revolutionary regime coalesces, moderates wind up in key positions of authority. If that government tries to put the breaks on the revolution, they will inevitably be criticized by more strident radical voices. If the conflict between radicals and moderates escalates, then the stage will be set for a second revolutionary wave, a more radical wave that sometimes succeeds and washes out the moderates, and other times breaks against the stormwall and is forced to fall back.

Before we go on today though, let’s get our terminology down, because words like “radical” and “moderate” can take on all sorts of meanings in people’s minds. The definition of these words shifts constantly depending on time period, geographic location, and political context. So, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about.

Let’s start with radicals and radicalism. I often find people misunderstanding one another about who or what should be called radical because we equivocate on the meaning of the word. Broadly speaking, we need to disentangle two types of radicalism: radicalism of means and radicalism of ends. Radicalism of means is a willingness to engage in any strategy or tactic that will achieve political objectives, whatever those objectives happen to. A radical in this case is somebody who will ignore both the spirit and the letter of any custom, law, rule, or norm in the pursuit of their objectives. The ends justify the means. Radicalism of means is thus measured by a willingness to do things beyond the bounds of what we might consider normal ethical behavior. It involves a flexible imagination, single-minded clarity of purpose, and very few compunctions about doing things that other people might consider bad or wrong. If a radical of means is losing a chess match, they might win that match by bashing their opponent over the head with a chair. This is the tactical approach of a radical of means. This kind of radicalism can be deployed towards any objective, so conservatives, liberals, moderates, all of them have radical wings. So a radical conservative is absolutely a thing, even if the words themselves appear to be contradictory. A radical conservative is someone willing to go to any length and use any tactic in defense of the status quo.

Now, the other type of radicalism is radicalism of ends. When we talk about ends here, we are talking about how much society will change from the present status quo. A conservative is somebody who wants things to change not at all, or change very, very slowly. A moderate is willing to tolerate some change, but not go too far or too fast. A radical, meanwhile, wants the complete reordering of society after an apocalyptic year zero, and this total reordering of society is often premised on the destruction of old social and political institutions. The goal of such radicals is not remodeling the house, but tearing it down and building something new from the foundation up. Radicalism of ends is not limited to left wing or progressive political actors; a religious fanatic might have the radical end of a theocracy, a nationalist might have the radical end of an ethnically pure society. The point being that the radical end involves a great departure from the present status quo, and a greater willingness to toss out institutions of that status quo that are seen as irredeemably corrupt.

Now, on the other side of our looming confrontation, we have moderates. In contrast to the radical, the moderate is going to limit the scope of their imagination, whether we’re talking about means or ends. Moderation of means entails having some kind of mental list of things one won’t do, that if one can only remain in power if one does X, and X is too radical a step to contemplate — whether it’s assassination, black male, or hostage taking — then the moderate will not do it. They will acknowledge defeat and quit the field. Moderation of ends, meanwhile, entails a cautious imagination about what is possible. Change and reform must happen, but it should not go too far or happen too fast. We must proceed one step at a time. They consider calls by radicals to cut the cord and sprint away from the chain to the past as a reckless risk that will provoke a backlash, threatening to undo even moderate revolutionary gains, let alone the great dreams of the radicals. For the moderate, prudence and patience are the watch words after so much chaos and violence.

With these parsed definitions in mind, we can now see that there can exist moderate radicals and radical moderates, which, like the radical conservatives, seems like a contradiction in terms. A moderate radical, though, is somebody who dreams of great social transformation, but has limits on what they are willing to do to achieve that grand objective. A radical moderate, meanwhile, is willing to engage in any activity or behavior necessary to ensure the revolution is not handed over to radicals, or anybody who wants to turn the world upside down. When I think about the French Revolution of 1848 and the ministers of the provisional government who deliberately sabotaged the national workshops in order to discredit them and halt further advances on the social front, well those seem like radical moderates to me.

So if we go back and survey the people who come to power after the first revolutionary wave, we typically find ourselves among moderates of ends. This is explainable in part because of where they come from. The first batch of post-revolutionary leaders is typically drawn from the ranks of the old ruling class as we broadly defined it: educated elites with the money, connections, and standing to have a place in society under the ancien regime, even if they were not actually holding the levers of power. These leaders then typically come from that breakaway faction of the ruling class we talked about in our early appendices, people who had become so resistant or frustrated with the now former sovereign that they launched a revolution to overthrow them. Before the dust even settles, these are the kinds of people then stepping into positions of post-revolutionary authority because they are the ones closest to the halls of power. To be in such a cohort means one is materially comfortable and probably at least a little bit respectable, even if they had been considered gadflies or nuisances at ancien regime cocktail parties. Everywhere we look in the first wave of post-revolutionary government, we find such prominent figures, who had names and reputations made before the revolution, not by the revolution.

For reasons not hard to understand then, this set of leaders naturally tends to be more limited in their revolutionary goals, they are quite moderate. Certainly they want to avoid the kind of root and branch destruction contemplated by the radicals. Why? Well, because the old ways weren’t all bad for them. So the goal is to reform some broken parts of the system without turning the world upside down, or, worse yet, losing credit with the banks. So moderation of ends prevails inside the committees assemblies and ministries now claiming sovereign authority over the realm. Though, it is worth pointing out that even if all these folks are considered moderates because they are moderates of ends, this first batch of moderate leaders have just passed through a period where they were quite radical on the question of means. They have, after all, just come from performing the mental gymnastics necessary to justify a revolutionary power grab. Even an arch moderate reformer like Francisco Madero was briefly a radical — it doesn’t get much more radical than launching an armed revolt against the government.

Complicating the situation for our first batch of moderate revolutionary leaders, from the Earl of Essex to Prince Lvov, is that upon taking up their post-revolutionary authority, their time and attention is now split. The issue here is that the revolutionary government must serve two masters, the revolution and Leviathan. The former demands liberty; the latter demands orders. Now that they oversee the administration of society, this group must see to it that society is well administered. Many of the functions of the former regime need to be maintained in full: municipal infrastructure, social programs, tax collection, the administration of justice and regulatory agencies, seeing that the entire military apparatus is still functional. The first generation of revolutionary leaders are now tasked with ensuring all that stays functional. This is an especially difficult task given that if the state was functional, there probably would not have been a revolution. So we are invariably talking about a society whose political and economic systems are frustratingly out of sorts. Just trying to keep the lights on will consume an enormous amount of time and energy and take up most of the emotional and psychological bandwidth of our initial revolutionary leaders.

But consumed as they are with trying to keep the lights on with maintaining order, with serving Leviathan, they also must deliver on the promises made by the revolution. These are usually pretty simple promises: liberty, equality, bread, land, freedom. But while it was easy to shout slogans like these to the masses while the ancien regime was recognized as the great obstacle to all of that, to anything and everything that one might desire, it turns out to be far more difficult to deliver after the obstacle has been removed. As it turns out, it was never just about one of our great idiots standing in the way of all that is good and pure. There are lots of competing interests out there that must be considered when formulating policy, lots of competing revolutionary interests. There’s tension after all when the workers cry for cheap bread and the peasants demand for better prices for their grain. Peasant demands for redistribution of land will incur protests from major landowners who may have themselves been a part of the revolutionary coalition seeking liberty, and might even consider breaking up their estates if they are adequately compensated, but adequate compensation means making demands of the peasants that might infringe on their conception of revolutionary liberty.

Governing means making decisions. Making decisions means making enemies. And if one’s decision making tends to routinely give short shrift to the maximum revolutionary program, if it is consistently limited, cautious, and moderate, then the radicals are going to be among the enemies made.

So what are some examples of this, of the moderate program of the first cohort of revolutionary leaders? Well, we can look at the English Civil War and see that parliamentary leaders coalesced around a few great lords, whose object in fighting the civil war initially was simply to gain a bit of leverage over the king, maybe force him to take them on as ministers, but that was it.

In the French Revolution, the moderates of the National Assembly eventually produced the moderate Constitution of 1791, which no one was happy with, but which especially incensed radical voices, who wanted to move in a far more republican, egalitarian and democratic direction.

In the Revolution of 1830, the Orléanists went into a room, locked the door, and revised the charter of government in the mildest way possible to avoid demands from young radicals in the streets to declare a republic.

When Francisco Madero got himself declared President of Mexico, his first order of business was reconciling with old Porfirians, and backing away from the demands made by the people who put him into power.

In Russia, the first provisional government was composed almost entirely of conservative liberals, whose only real objective was restoring some competence to the state apparatus and nothing more. In fact, they were terrified of anything more than that.

And this takes us back to our old friend, frustration. Radicals who came out into the street, manned the barricades, joined citizen militias, expected their service and sacrifice to mean something. And instead, they open the newspaper each day to discover that the people that they have fought to elevate into power might not be interested in delivering on the promises of the revolution. And so frustration sets in. And just as they had vented their frustrations with the ancien regime, the radicals now begin to vent their frustration with the first cohort of moderate leaders.

Now, radical frustration with the moderates is driven by a mix of true belief and self-interest. True belief is not something to be casually dismissed. Sometimes we find radical leaders like Danton or Lenin, or. Describe merely in terms of Machiavellian calculation and self-interest. But radicals are often radicals for very simple reasons.

It’s because they believe in the radical program. They believe that the revolution will be deed half done if it does not deliver on its full promise. So in the days, weeks, and months after the revolution, they are shocked and outraged and appalled by the scattered crumbs brushed down onto the floor by the moderates who claim sovereignty over the realm. Their frustration and anger and disappointment is then further exacerbated by fear, most especially fear of counter revolution. And so while moderates may argue that the radicals will go too far, and that will open the door for a backlash in counter revolution, the radicals argue the opposite, that the very moderation of the moderates is what invites counter revolution. Radicals are outraged and appalled at the lack of vigorous measures against enemies of the revolution — people who should be in prison or in exile are wandering around free.

But while we should not ignore the fact that radicals are not just saying things that they genuinely believe that their larger program could, should, and must be enacted, let’s also not kid ourselves about the nature of ambition and self-interest. Most of our radical leaders come from a lower social tier than the first cohort of leaders who stepped into positions of authority after the revolution. Had our radical leaders been richer or more important or more influential, they would probably already be in the halls of government right now. Radicals thus tend to come from the second tier of the educated and comfortable set of society, a lot of young lawyers and journalists and military officers. They are passionate strivers who, whether they are fully conscious of it or not, are pursuing their own personal life ambitions, as they push press and criticize the inadequacy of the moderates. So, it is true belief, yes, but it’s also an obvious path to personal power.

So the growing chorus of radicals who are opposed to the moderates fall into the classification set of radical radicals, those who are unfettered by traditional norms of behavior, but who are also pursuing total social, political, and economic transformation. They demand that more radical means be deployed by the revolutionary government to advance the revolution and defend the revolution. They demand sterner, tougher, and more uncompromising. revolutionary government. They want to use pressure and intimidation and violence to achieve their goals. And they want to use these radical means in pursuit of radical ends: mass redistribution of land, the nationalization of industry, democratic equality, whatever counts as the radical position in the time and place and context we’re talking about. Radicals want to fight against foot draggers and layabouts and corrupt sellouts down at city hall. They want no more excuses, no more delays, they want the government to deliver on the simple promises of the revolution. And as each new policy, law, or decree falls short to the radical expectations, frustration mounts, and factional battle lines become well drawn. As the weeks, months, and sometimes even years pass, the tension and conflict between the moderate government to the first wave and the radical tendencies of the coming second wave ebb and flow, build and recede, until some great moment of truth arrives, which triggers the radical attempt to stage a second revolution.

As radical challenges to the moderates mount, the moderates often find themselves caught in a dilemma. The first cohort of moderates often come to power having denounced the coercive tyranny of the former regime, and they promised to respect everyone’s political liberties, it’s one of the great reasons they went into revolution in the first place. They thus have difficulty cracking down on opponents, even as their opponents get openly belligerent. Moderates are bound by their principles to allow their enemies to operate out in the open and thus allow the second revolutionary wave to build.

So even after the Bolsheviks got caught up in an armed insurrection in July 1917, the response from the provisional government was incredibly mild. Lenin and a few other leaders skipped town, but mostly the Bolsheviks… just got left alone.

Freedom of speech and thought and the press meant that the Jacobin Club and the Cordeliers’ Club could agitate right out in the open, and moderates in the National Assembly and then subsequent Legislative Assembly were helpless to do anything about it.

When Lafayette attempted to arrest Marat for inflammatory speech, public sentiment mostly sided with Marat, and Lafayette was forced to back down.

But even if it’s not about principle or public opinion, moderates have another incentive to not come down too hard on the radicals: there’s an understanding that the radicals are the most committed soldiers in the war against reactionaries and counter revolution. Radicals are naturally going to be the most dedicated and most committed defenders of the revolution. Moderates can’t afford to alienate them too much for fear of losing their shock troops, the people we need to hold the line against counter revolution because we can’t do it ourselves.

So as tension builds and builds, there is then another big thing thrown into the mix, and that is that this is often happening in the context of a wartime emergency. As we noted in our last appendices, revolutions bring out all sorts of different wars, both foreign and domestic, and if the war has any sort of ideological dimension where the very survival of the revolution appears to be at stake, radical demands are going to come with an existential bite. Toleration of counter revolutionary activity must be met with severe consequences. The enemy is at the gate. For the revolution to survive, the enemy must be destroyed. And when we look back over our revolutions, we often find that just as with the first wave, military debacles often accompany the second wave. We’re talking here of things like the failures of the French armies in the spring of 1792, Kerensky’s failed offensive in the summer of 1917; these failures discredit the moderates and get people’s heads turning towards radical critics who promise to win the war and save the revolution, or in the case of the Bolsheviks, end the war and save the revolution.

Now, an interesting distinction between the first wave and the second wave of the revolution is that the second wave uprising is often planned in advance and launched according to a prearranged timetable. As we’ve seen, one of the great hallmarks of the first wave of the revolution is that it breaks out spontaneously, it’s random, it catches everyone by surprise. Both revolutionaries and defenders of the ancien regime scramble to respond to an event that nobody foresaw. But the second wave typically comes after degree of planning. Arrangements are made. Orders are given. A date is circled on the calendar. The second wave does not happen as a spontaneous reaction to some trigger, but because somebody decided that this is the moment we strike.

So what are some examples of this? Well, obviously the French Revolution looms large. The French Revolution was defined by conflicts between “moderates” and “radicals,” whatever those terms happen to mean at any given time, as they did change meaning depending on whether we’re talking about 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, or 1794. But obviously the great radical second wave was the insurrection of August 10th, 1792, an event which often goes by the name, the Second Revolution. Total. And frankly justified loss of faith in the King combined with a looming threat of Austria and Prussia led Danton and other Paris radicals to plan, organize, and stage a revolutionary insurrection. They gathered forces, they circled the date, and then they rang the tocsin at the appointed hour.

This was also true in Russia in October 1917. The October Revolution was a planned and orchestrated assault on Kerensky’s government — unlike the first revolution, which followed the spontaneous activities of the women in Petrograd, who, it should be remembered, the Bolsheviks had told to stand down. Now these two incredibly famous moments in revolutionary history also get us into the dynamic of the people who initially made the revolution eventually get thrown overboard by the revolution. And we’ll get much more into the revolution eating its children next week. But the overthrow of the moderates by radicals indicates that there is presently a lot of activity in the kitchen. Now, August 1792 and October 1917 are the most famous radical second waves to hit a revolution. And because the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are the two greatest and most influential revolutions in world history, we might think to ourselves that radicals rising up and overtaking moderates is just a thing that happens in the normal course of a revolution.

But as often as not this radical second wave manifests itself, but is then defeated by the moderates. That’s what happened in all the subsequent French revolutions we talked about. After the Revolution of 1830, moderates took control of the French government to the increasing frustration and anger of young Neo-Jacobin radicals in Paris. These radicals subsequently staged the June Rebellion of 1832, which was an attempt to revive the revolution and push France towards an egalitarian republic. This uprising was defeated by forces loyal to the moderates in a matter of days. Now we often treat 1830 and 1832 as two separate historical events, but really 1832 is best understood as the failed second wave of 1830.

Similarly, the June Day’s uprising of 1848 was launched against the moderates of the February Revolution, but instead of succeeding, it was beaten back down by those moderates. This is also a way to view the relationship between the moderates of the third French Republic and the radicals of the Paris Commune. The Commune, like its radical predecessors was crushed by the moderates. And we also saw this throughout Central Europe in 1848, as, for example, moderate German liberals rallied to put down the forces of the Heckers and Struves of the world.

There are also times when such a second wave either does not materialize at all, or to the extent that the revolution is radicalized, it doesn’t necessarily follow from the concerted action of any radical group. The American Revolution had radicals and moderates, but it’s not like John Adams ever staged an armed coup to win the debate over independence. The Haitian revolution radicalized as emancipation went from unthinkable to fact of life, but this just occurred inside a five-sided messy conflict rather than a binary struggle between moderates in power and radicals out of power trying to overthrow them. In South America, Simone Bolivar traveled a path from seeking merely republican independence for Gran Colombia to seeking to overturn the racial caste system and emancipate the slaves, but this did not involve a direct insurrectionary dynamic like August 1792 or October 1917.

So as we talked about last week, with the fact that there’s always a restorationists wing of any revolutionary civil war, there’s also going to be a radical faction inside of the revolution. That faction is always going to be present, they are always gonna want to push further, and they would love to toss the moderate sellouts out on their butts. But they’re not always gonna have the forces or resources or luck necessary to carry that out. So the radical challenge will thus always manifest, but it can be beaten back.

But other times they very much do have the forces and resources and luck necessary to carry it out. And so next week we will move on to the subsequent attempt to consolidate and settle the revolution once and for all. This typically involves crackdowns, purges, imprisonment, exile, and executions for those on the wrong side of the revolutionary government, whether it takes the form of a dramatic reign of terror carried out by victorious radicals, or more mundane repression by the state, because the moderates won their conflict with the radicals and now would very much like to restore order, such top down violence by the government on the people — or at least some targeted group of the people — inevitably follows.

As we discussed in the first appendices, ultimately, the legitimacy of any government rests on its monopoly on violent force, and eventually the revolutionary government is going to have to prove that it has a monopoly on violent force, and it is this late stage process in any revolutionary event that often takes that revolutionary event to one of the most common results of any revolution, and that is authoritarian dictatorship.

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Harry’s. Time is a precious thing, and when our schedules get backed up and overrun, we often find ourselves cutting it close as we go from here to there and from this to that. It doesn’t leave a lot of time to agonize over what kind of blades to shave with, and once you choose Harry’s, you should know that they have the highest customer satisfaction in the shaving industry. Plus, you don’t have to remember to go to the store to get them, they’ll just arrive when you need them. And shaving will remain what it ought to be: a reliably efficient experience.

Now, one of the things I like best about Harry’s is its simple and elegant design. The shaves are great, and I’m not spending money on razors that are overpriced by design. The ergonomic weighted handle not only feels good when I’m shaving, but it looks good too. There’s no frills, no nonsense, just a good looking shave.

So right now you can get Harry’s starter set for just $3, plus you’ll get a free travel size body wash. This set includes a five-blade razor, weighted handle, foaming shave gel, and a travel cover, a $16 value for just $3. Just visit harrys.com/revolutions, so no matter how busy things get, stay fresh with Harry’s. Get your Harry’s starter set today, and you’ll also get a free travel size body wash.

Go to harrys.com/revolutions — that’s harrys.com/revolutions.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Trade Coffee. I drink coffee every morning. It’s an essential part of my routine. And so if you’re like me, you need to try Trade, the coffee subscription service that makes it simple for you to enjoy the best cup of coffee every morning while also discovering new blends and varieties to keep things fresh. Now, I love a good coffee shop as much as the next person, the atmosphere, the vibes, the people. It’s a great place to get together and work or chat or just hang out, but it’s not something we can do every day, and coffee is something I need every day. So I start every day with reliable deliveries from Trade at home, and then the rest of my day can unfold as it pleases.

This week I got the Power and Glory blend from Feast Coffee. It’s got a chocolatey sweetness with a hefty body, which meets the glory of citrus aromatics and notes of fresh fruit. So upgrade your coffee today with Trade Coffee and let them take the guesswork out of finding your perfect cup. Right now Trade is offering our listeners a total of $30 off your subscription plus free shipping at drinktrade.com/revolutions.

That’s drinktrade.com/revolutions for $30 off your subscription to the best coffees in the country — drinktrade.com/revolutions.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Better Help. It would sure be nice if life came with an owner’s manual. If something in our life starts to go haywire isn’t working properly, we could just flip to the relevant section of the manual and say, ah, yes, it’s this specific part that I need to fix. I’ll do this, I’ll do that, and voila, everything is better. But life doesn’t work like that. We don’t have a manual. Better Help Online Therapy is basically the next best thing. I’ve had very good success with therapy, helping me map out the equivalent of an owner’s manual for my life, so I know what needs maintenance, how often, and to what end, and when new things happen and new things go wrong, it gives me some basic troubleshooting skills to identify the nature and scope of the issue, so I know what part of the manual to be looking in.

As the world’s largest therapy service, Better Help has matched 3 million people with professionally licensed and vetted therapists available a hundred percent online. Plus it’s affordable. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to match with a therapist. If things aren’t clicking, you can easily switch to a new therapist anytime. It couldn’t be simpler. No waiting rooms, no traffic, no endless searching for the right therapist. Learn more and save 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/revolutions. That’s betterhelp.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 8: Wars, Both Foreign and Domestic

Last time we discussed a nearly universal characteristic that follows any successful revolution, and that’s the entropy of victory. Today we’re gonna talk about another near universal characteristic that follows a successful revolution, and that is war.

Now we know that in normal times, war is the continuation of politics by other means. This goes double in a revolutionary moment, when all the old rules and norms and laws of politics have collapsed anyway. Violence has already entered the picture as a viable and justifiable means to political ends, so it’s not much of a leap for a full blown war to break out as a direct consequence of the revolution. So what we’re gonna do today is break down the types and categories of revolutionary wars, both civil and international, because though war itself may be a constant, the particulars depend very much on time, place, and circumstance.

Now, first, let’s talk about domestic wars — civil wars. One thing that became very clear to me in making this podcast is that all revolutions are civil wars. It is always and everywhere the case in a revolution that at least two sides are contesting sovereign power using force. The preponderance of force stage of the revolution is by its very nature a civil war. Now, this is true whether it’s armies on a battlefield or street fighting around barricades. So technically, civil war has already entered the picture thanks to the contest over the preponderance of force, but we’ve already talked about that. What we’re here to talk about today are the kinds of conflicts that happen after that phase. Whether that phase took three days, or three years, or three decades, it resulted in revolutionary victory. And what happens after revolutionary victory is what we’re here to talk about.

Now, there are two broad categories of civil war that follow revolutionary victory. One is wars between revolutionary factions, now that the entropy of victory has broken their unity. The other kind is wars between the revolutionary regime and some restorationist group fighting to bring back the ancien regime. Typically, these two types of civil war are gonna be happening simultaneously, driving into each other and freeing off of each other, because we would hate for anything to be simple and uncomplicated.

Now, to take the second of these types first, in any post-revolutionary moment, we invariably find a rump force still loyal to the old regime, that’s ready to organize an armed struggle to reclaim sovereignty from the revolutionaries. This is often considered a realistic goal because of the growing disunity of those revolutionaries. Like we may have been defeated, but now look at them squabbling and backstabbing. We can regroup and stage a comeback.

Now, in the early going, the goal of this group will often be the literal restoration of the ousted sovereign: the aim of putting King Charles I, or King Louis XVI, or Tsar Nicholas II back on their rightful throne. But problematically, if a sovereign has been overthrown by a revolution, it’s often because their appeal as individuals has become, you know, rather limited. When the Russian Whites were initially trying to get organized, hey, we’re trying to bring back Nicholas and Alexandra was not much of a sales pitch. So what I’ve observed about these counter-revolutionary restorationist movements is that they start growing in size and strength and potency once they become more about restoring the former regime generally and less about restoring the former sovereign specifically. The royalist restoration in Britain succeeded when it represented the institutions of a royal dynasty rather than Charles I, the individual human. The Royal and Catholic armies in Vendée were trying to restore the monarchy after Louis the 16th got his head chopped off, but not Louis the 16th — he had gotten his head chopped off. And then ultimately, what Russian White leaders like Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin started doing was trumpeting the restoration of the Russian Empire, one and Indivisible, but not necessarily Nicholas and Alexandra. It was actually somewhat helpful when the revolutionaries dispatched these various problematic sovereigns because the restorationists were free to pursue the idea of the old regime, the overthrown ruler themselves safely relegated to permanent martyrdom, thanks to an ax, a guillotine, or a pistol.

Now there’s always gonna be a faction committed to the restoration of the old regime, but it’s not the case that this faction is always going to become strong enough to wage some kind of counter-revolutionary civil war against the new revolutionary regime. There were, of course, Bourbon legitimate who organized after 1830, but they never had the size or the strength necessarily to challenge the July Monarchy. Then after 1848, there were Legitimists and Orléanists running around, but they didn’t have the juice to challenge the Second Empire. And then after 1871, there were Legitimists and Orléanists and Bonapartists, none of them commanding enough support on their own to wrest control of the state from the others, and so they all fell into an unhappy business partnership that we call the Third Republic. So there are always gonna be die hard diagnostic claims and supporters, but those claims and supporters no longer capture wide attention or interest.

The same was true ultimately of diehard Porfirians in Mexico. There was a faction that kind of rallied to Felix Diaz, but it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The groups that fought for control of Mexico after 1910 mostly moved on from the Porphyrian dynasty. So while there is always some restorationists faction in play, they are not going to define what form revolutionary civil war takes.

That leaves the other type of civil, the one that stems directly from the entropy of victory. This is revolutionary on revolutionary violence. Intra-revolutionary conflict can break out along any of the lines of discord we talked about in Appendix Seven: socioeconomic class, geographic regionalism, political ideology, religious belief, straight up personal conflict. We’ve seen these types of civil war break out all over the place in the podcast: fighting between Bolsheviks, SRs, and anarchists, the Mountain versus the Gerondins, fighting between liberals and socialists, between centralists and federalists, republicans and constitutional monarchists. If we look at the United States after Yorktown, things like Shea’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion can be framed as at least civil war-ish conflicts between two wings of the victorious revolutionaries along socioeconomic and regional lines. To wit, rural western farmers against the eastern commercial elites.

Now, in some cases, the Civil war side of the equation seems to overawe the revolutionary side. Revisionist historians think the Civil War aspects of the English Revolution were so pronounced that they want to call the whole period the English Civil Wars. The Haitian Revolution had lots of intra-revolutionary conflict culminating especially with the War of Knives between Louverture and Rigaud, which broke down along regional and ethnic lines. And then so much of post independent Spanish America was defined by competing caudillos, these conflicts often being less about ideology and more about regional factionalism. This was a pattern that held all the way through the Mexican Revolution, which, not unlike the English Revolution, is often recast as merely a civil war with barely any revolutionary content to speak of, it was just powerful leaders vying for the throne. Now, I personally think it was much more than that, but one could frame it that way.

Now I can only speak of the revolutions that we’ve covered, but it seems clear that even setting aside the preponderance of force phase of the conflict, all revolutions will involve a further civil war of some kind or another. And it is usually a mix of the two types that we just talked about, where disunity and fighting among the revolutionary groups allows restorationists groups to spy an opportunity to strike, creating multi-front and multi-factional conflicts where it’s often not clear who’s fighting who and who is on whose side. This certainly describes the situation in the French Revolution after about 1792 and the Russian Revolution after 1917, where there were simultaneously strong restorationist forces in the field and intensely bitter conflicts amongst the revolutionaries themselves.

But were civil wars, the only types of wars consuming the French Revolution and Russian Revolution, or any of the other revolutions? Oh, good gracious, no. That would make things far too simple. Because revolutions are also always at the doorstep of a foreign war. One of the other big takeaways from all my reading about all these revolutions is that the international dimension is vital to understanding the revolution’s trajectory. No revolution unfolds in an isolated bubble. That is because no polity on earth, be it a city state, or a kingdom, or a republic, or an empire, operates in an isolated bubble. We are always connected beyond the territorial bounds of our societies. When something is tumultuous and destabilizing as a revolution breaks out, foreign neighbors are going to get dragged into it one way or the other. Cash, weapons, supplies, soldiers, and diplomats start crossing borders in both directions, as all the interested parties in the revolution seek aid and comfort from various foreign powers, and those foreign powers look to increase their influence and interest inside the polity undergoing the revolution. Now, sometimes this stops short of full blown declarations of war, and unfolds instead as proxy conflicts within the context of the inevitable civil wars. But other times, domestic revolution leads directly to international war.

Now, there is something of a prevailing myth out there that the most common type of international war will break out when neighboring powers fear the spread of radical ideas, and invade and crush the revolution to restore the ancien regime. One imagines an ousted sovereign turning up in a neighboring court begging for help, and the sympathetic neighbor saying, ah, yes, we must raise troops to put down the revolution before it spreads. Now don’t get me wrong, this does happen sometimes — the Russians sometimes march into Hungary — but usually it’s not that way at all. The great powers of Europe eventually concluded the first French Republic was an intolerable menace that had to be destroyed, but that’s not how the war started. Indeed, almost nowhere do we find international powers mobilizing for war primarily on restorationists grounds; not in the English Revolution nor the American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, Spanish American Independence, not in 1830 or 1848 or 1870, not in Mexico or in Russia.

Now these kinds of things can happen — France did after all invade Spain in the early 1820s with the express purpose of overthrowing the liberal regime and restoring Bourbon absolutism — but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. I mean, even after the Allies had been at war with France for 23 years, they still found themselves without a clear answer of who should follow Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, because the allies did not agree amongst themselves that it was a war aim to restore the Bourbons to power.

Now what more typically draws neighbors into a war is not their solidarity with the ousted monarch, who could after all, easily be a long despised rival who they were happy to watch burn, but instead their interests in the neighbor’s resources, strength, and general disposition. Probably, they’ve had local clients who were always happy to orient trade and diplomatic relations in the foreign patron’s direction, and now that the regime has broken down completely they want to back factions most inclined to support their interests. This is what happened in the Mexican Revolution, where the United States, with all its banks and guns decided to be the king maker of Mexico. They constantly shifted their support. First Villa was great, and then he was the devil. Madero and Carranza and Obregon came in and out of favor. What the United States wanted more than anything else was hegemonic influence over Mexico, permanent political stability, and commercial profits. They didn’t really care who delivered it.

This also happened in Haiti, which effectively became a battlefield between the British and Spanish and French forces in addition to the local population, because it was the most profitable piece of real estate in the world. And in Russia, you can see how much the Allied occupations of the periphery of the empire and their support for the Whites was less about needing to restore Nicholas and Alexandra to the throne and far more about advancing each country’s political and economic interests in post-revolutionary Russia.

But it is also true that sometimes it’s less about calculation of interests of wealth and power, and instead comes down to the mood and temper of those with the power to make war and peace. This is when individual agency can come into play. Like the big shift in Hapsburg policy in 1792, thanks to the death of Emperor Leopold II, who was staunchly committed to staying out of France and the ascension of his son Francis II, who was ideologically committed to putting down the revolution. So sometimes it’s true that the whims and personality of individual rulers decide things, and this is a big deal, especially for Francis II because he was subsequently emperor until 1835 and never really changed his mind.

Now, as often as not, revolutionary wars are not started by the foreign powers looking to invade or capture or destroy the revolution, but are instead started by the revolutionaries themselves — that is, they are looking to expand and grow their power, which leads to war with their neighbors. The wars of the French Revolution, I think, began when the Jacobins started to push for a war in 1791 and 1792 as like, a character building exercise that would invigorate the nation and push the expansion of this Empire of Liberty they were trying to create. They had dreams of the universal salvation of mankind and wanted to overthrow neighboring regimes to see it done. In the Russian context, the Red Army’s campaigns on their western flank were about expanding the Communist revolution to Germany and beyond. Now, in the case of their conflict with Poland, well, Poland had its own expansionist dreams that ran them right into Russian expansionist dreams, so it’s not like the Polish Soviet War was entirely about Bolshevik dreams of worldwide socialist revolution, but that did have a lot to do with it. There was a reason they were trying to march on Warsaw, and that was to create a bridge to Germany. And many observers saw the battle of Warsaw explicitly in terms of a battle between capitalism and communism, with the result being the miraculous salvation of capitalism from the invading communists.

Now, there are course also international wars where the neighboring country or foreign power is not at all opposed to the idea of revolution at all. Sometimes the regime is positively giddy at the idea that a revolution has broken out somewhere in a neighbor’s territory because of the wonderful opportunities it affords. The prototypical example of this is France deciding to support British North America in their rebellion against crown and Parliament; it was certainly a wonderful opportunity to stick it to the British. Simone Bolivar tried to get the United States to play a similar role in the struggles for Spanish American Independence, but was rejected. It took support from a different neighboring power, the Free Republic of Haiti, the second free and independent nation in the western hemisphere, that got him back on track. And during the Russian Revolution, Russia itself was blockaded, but after the founding of the ComIntern, the Russians flipped all of this, and they became the patrons of revolutions in other countries. They were always willing to play the role of banker or arms dealer and safe haven for communist revolutionaries abroad.

Now, one sort of exception I do want to talk about here is the Revolution of 1830, which was not followed by an international conflict. And we might simply say, oh, well yeah, well, not much changed, so there was no reason for a war, but it was a fear of international war that was one of the main selling points of Louis Philippe; certainly it’s what earned him Lafayette’s support. Because there would have been a war if the result of the July Days fighting had either been the declaration of another French Republic or the elevation of a bone apart to the throne. The words republique and Bonaparte meant only war, and it is very unlikely that in 1830 the other great powers of Europe would’ve allowed either a republic or a Bonapartist restoration without a fight. And so, the French swapped one Bourbon for another, and then made it very clear in their first communications with all the other foreign offices of Europe, we are not a threat to you, we mean you no harm.

So what all of these wars mean, whether they are foreign wars or civil wars, is that a revolutionary epoch is a militarized epoch. Nearly all the revolutions we’ve talked about involve military mobilization on a scale that far exceeded the military mobilizations of the ancien regime. From the creation of the New Model Army to the creation of the Continental Army, the levée en masse, the Red Army, the various armies of the Mexican Revolution and Spanish American independence and the Haitian Revolution, we have tons of people either volunteering to serve in the ranks, or conscripted into service. In all of these places, the number of people under arms dramatically increased, and the hearts and minds of tons and tons of people were stamped by military service, with the drilling and the orders, the battles, the blood, the boredom, the losses, the courage, the victories, all of it. The shared experience of war marks the revolutionary generation.

And one of the effects of this is that military service has always afforded an opportunity for upward mobility. The army and the navy have always had room for talented recruits and opportunities for young men to advance up the social ladder, and in a revolutionary war, these opportunities are everywhere. People can come from nowhere and become something. This is especially true in a situation where the martial aspects of the revolution increase, and so the social and political authority of military officers increases beyond their mere military authority. This upward churn creates leaders and heroes and, at the very top, opportunities for commanders in chief to lead the whole nation. Napoleon is obviously the most famous example of this, but George Washington went from merely being a prominent Virginia planter to being, like, god of America. Simone Bolivar did it in South America, Obregon did it in Mexico. If wars are everywhere, soldiers will become your leaders.

But all these civil wars and foreign wars requires bodies to be sacrificed, and so what we often find amongst the lower classes is an initial burst of enthusiasm and volunteering giving way to hostility to ongoing conscription. This then becomes a major driver of resentment and backlash against the revolutionary regime. Husbands and brothers and sons, and fathers being hauled off to go kill or die in a war they don’t really wanna fight in. Obviously in the French Revolution, the Vendée uprising is explicitly an uprising against conscription. Throughout the old Russian Empire, every side engaged in impressment and conscription of one kind or another, which provoked local resistance whenever and wherever it happened. Dodging the draft, whoever’s draft it was, became a cause for local celebration of the sly foxes who kept clear of the recruitment officers. It created enormous amounts of resentment and it created distrust between the people and their governments.

Now, going alongside this resentment over conscription is resentment over requisitions, where armies operating in theaters are simply plundering the local population in order to keep the war machine going. These requisitions at bayonet point often seem very anathema to the idea of liberation and emancipation and utopian prosperity that the revolution was supposed to be about. Instead, people wearing revolutionary cockades or stars on their hat come around telling you you have to give them all your chickens. With civil wars and foreign wars erupting all over the place, the common people always have to endure crisscrossing armies conscripting and requisitioning and then occasionally running into each other in huge battles that cause enormous pain, suffering, and destruction wherever they break out. And this is a huge part of the explanation for why revolutions break out with so much hope and optimism, and often sink into so much cynicism and pessimism.

Warmaking also has a profound effect on the course of the revolution. With existential emergencies constantly coursing through the revolution, the new regime has to deal with every single one of them. And as they attempt to win whatever war it happens to be fighting, they’re often led to take draconian measures implemented for the salvation of the revolution. And if the government is not doing enough, if they seem to be losing the war, this presents a path for radical challenges to that regime. Radicals can demand sterner measures and more clear eyed leadership. They can say that victory alone ensures survival, that this is no time to hem and haw and have a heart.

So next week, we’ll get to the stage in the revolution I’m sure you all knew was coming eventually: the radicalization of the revolution, when many of those who started the revolution are now suspected of being weak-willed traitors who can no longer be trusted with power. And with so much at stake, how can we possibly allow them to remain in power even one day longer?

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Better Help. We all go through life with problems. Living a nice, healthy life is not about solving problems until there are no more problems — that’s impossible — it’s about having strategies to resolve our problems so that we have the mental and emotional bandwidth that deal with new problems as they come along. A really terrible strategy for resolving our old problems is to not deal with them, to just keep rehearsing them in our heads. We get fixated on reminding ourselves what the problem is and forget the point is defining the problem so that we can resolve it, not just torture ourselves excessively.

And one of the things a good therapist can do is help flip the dynamic around, to shake us out of our habit of wasting so much time rehashing our problems, and instead use that time to focus on solving them, because mostly we don’t even realize we’re doing. Therapy works because it gives us a broader perspective to see the bigger picture and work towards overcoming and solving and disentangling ourselves from our problems rather than just sitting with them forever. When you wanna be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/revolutions today to get 10% off your first month.

That’s betterhelp.com/revolutions.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions

Appendix 7: The Entropy of Victory

Last week we ended with victory for the revolution and defeat for the now former sovereign. This was the moment when one of our great idiots of history stepped forward and managed to screw things up so badly that despite every material, political, social, and ideological advantage, still managed to get overthrown. I mean, you have to be pretty incompetent to allow this to happen. And yet, here we are. It came down to that final test of strength, the regime failed it. And was transformed by the mystical trifecta of loss of faith, loss of trust, and loss of will from a regime into ancien regime.

Now, as we discussed last time, one of the truly remarkable things about our great idiots is how they managed to unite so many different people with so many different interests against them. Nobles and commoners, owners and workers, landlords and peasants, university professors and illiterate laborers. They all came to share a belief that the sovereign was an obstacle. An obstacle to what? It didn’t matter. Whatever it is the heart desired. And so this vast revolutionary coalition full of people with almost as many interests as there were individuals in the coalition came together to do this one thing: remove the obstacle.

Well, now, that unifying obstacle has been removed, which brings us today to one of the great recurring themes of the Revolutions Podcast. It has happened in every revolution to every class of revolutionary and every class of revolution: the entropy of victory, when unity of shared purpose turns almost immediately into the chaos of factional conflict.

Now, at first, there’s naturally a real wave of optimism and euphoria that follows the departure of the sovereign. The drinking is fueled now by joy rather than rage. Toasts to victory are raised in palaces and cafes and dormitories, and out in the streets, and whether people are drinking expensive champagne or grog from a communal barrel, it’s all singing and dancing and hand shaking and backslapping and partying. We’ve done it. The bad old regime has been overthrown; viva la revolución. In the parties and parades and events that follow, the defecting opposition part of the ruling class — the people who are about to step into the uppermost ranks of power in like the executive ministry — pledge to the people that they will do all that the revolution promised. The people in the streets greet this with cheers and say, yes, yes, it is good now that you are in charge, hurray, please go do the things we expect the revolution to do. Everyone agrees that everything is great.

But when the booze wears off and the sober and hungover light of day intrudes, our oh so recently unified revolutionaries gaze upon each other with fresh eyes. The naïve only belatedly realized after the fact that the revolutionary coalition will not hold after revolutionary victory. The more savvy and calculating have already begun making moves to ensure that their revolutionary program becomes the revolutionary program. And there are many programs to choose from. Is this the end of reform or the beginning of reform? Have we already gone too far and need to pull back, or have we not gone far enough and need to push forward? Differences of opinion about what the revolution is and what it means can break down along economic class lines or geography or religion or naked interpersonal conflict, but it does break down, and it will break down.

Now, this does not necessarily happen right away; sometimes it can take as long as several hours. But however long it takes, the revolutionaries will turn on each other. They’ll maneuver against each other, box each other out, and shut each other down.

Now one of the main recurrent lines of division that we’ve seen over the course of our revolutions is the divide between the salon revolutionaries and the street revolutionaries, a division defined mostly by economic and social class under the ancien regime. We can now firmly identify salon revolutionaries with those breakaway elements of the ruling class and their educated supporters, who do revolution by talking, writing, and moving money around. Meanwhile, the popular forces unleashed by the revolutionary trigger are synonymous with the street revolutionaries, who do revolution with barricades, paving stones and guns. Both the elites in the salon and the commoners out in the street need each other to win, but their goals and interests and motivations are very different. Especially because one of the first post-revolutionary goals of the salon revolutionaries is restoring order and getting everyone in the street to go home, while one of the first post= revolutionary goals of the street revolutionaries is to stay in the street and keep pushing until all the bastards have been overthrown, not just some of them.

But that said, this would be a very superficial analysis if we just said, oh, the elites in the salon are united in their class and the commoners in the streets are united by their class, and so now class conflict will follow this brief period of cross-class unity. Because the divisions that lead to post-revolutionary entropy are more subtle than that. So, for example, there are a few different species of salon revolutionary who will immediately join in combat with each other for post-revolutionary ascendancy. On a political axis, they range from conservative to radical, sort of hewing to their economic and social class, but by no means bound by that class.

So to start, on the most conservative side of the spectrum, we have our most reluctant of revolutionaries. These are the people who are revolutionaries bracketed by scare quotes; they are “revolutionaries.” Typically, they are grandees of the old regime who were fed up with specific ministers and specific policies of the former sovereign and who were ready, eager, and downright willing to accept even the mildest of reforms or compromises to head off revolution. But because a great idiot was in charge, they could not even get that much. So the program of these most conservative of revolutionaries is the absolute minimum number of changes and reforms necessary to resecure this sacred thing called order. They witnessed the explosion of popular forces into the streets as an unmitigated disaster. Whatever joy they took in victory was overcome immediately by anxiety and fear that these popular forces will be worse than the old.

Their first post-revolutionary object is to return as much of society as possible to the way it had been before, to get things back to normal. Get the people off the streets and back into their homes, get regular economic activity restarted, make whatever necessary alterations to the political structure need to be made, but other than that, let’s get as much as possible as quickly as possible back to normal. These guys absolutely do not want a social revolution, they barely want a political revolution.

Now, the complaints of these most conservative of revolutionaries are typically, as I just said, mostly matters of personnel and policy rather than deep-seated ideological conviction. But adjacent to them on the conservative radical spectrum are those who do have ideological convictions. They have abstract ideals and beliefs about how a polity should be organized and governed, but who view the recent revolution as the full achievement of these ideological convictions. That once a limited set of post-revolutionary reforms have been implemented, that’s it, that’s what we came here to do, and that’s what we’re gonna keep doing forever. To borrow some useful terminology from post-Revolution of 1830 French politics, I am talking here about a thing called the Party of Resistance. The revolution for them is the end point. That whatever the sovereign had been doing that was so offensive should be undone — and we’ll perhaps sprinkle in some reforms to ensure such things don’t happen again — but that’s it. This group is also terrified of the popular forces that have been unleashed, and they want to close Pandora’s box before social revolution escapes. In their minds, any campaign for additional post-revolutionary progress or reform has to be shut down. Because while their revolution to overthrow an intolerable sovereign was necessary, revolution itself? Is bad, very, very bad.

So sticking with our post-1830 nomenclature, the Party of Resistance is contrasted with this thing called the Party of Movement. And here we situate our old friend Lafayette, who was associated with the Party of Movement after 1830. Lafayette is our bog standard liberal noble. He has deep political convictions and believes that sometimes revolutions are justified and sometimes they are not. But if and when a revolution does happen, it is meant to establish a regularized framework for further reform and a continuous renewal of society. Movement. Now, generally speaking, Lafayette and his cohort of liberal nobles were not thrilled about revolution, and would also prefer order be restored and people in the streets return to their homes, but they believed that the way to maintain permanent order was to funnel all that energy into a political framework designed to facilitate reform rather than stifle it. The revolution was supposed to lay the groundwork for more reform and more change and more progress. The revolution was supposed to be the beginning of something, not the end of anything. The Party of Movement types are extremely hostile to more conservative Party of Resistance types, and downright mortified in fact, that if the forces of resistance prevail that it would just lay the groundwork for… another revolution. They believe that reform was a release valve, not a ignition switch. And if the Party of Resistance wasn’t careful, the Party of Movement might decide it had no choice but to call the streets back into play.

But sliding over to the more radical side of the spectrum, there are voices inside the salons who are not mortified at all by the popular forces out in the street. Who do not think the first order of business is order. These radicals are the link to the streets. They do not think that link is merely an alliance of necessity entered into with anxious trepidation and terminated at the earliest opportunity. No, no, no. They believe the revolution in the streets is the revolution, that those popular forces, the people ought to be the main focus of the post-revolutionary program. They thus tend to be far more democratic in their politics and happy to make promises that their other brethren in the salon would view as crossing the line from political to social revolution. With society in a scramble as a result of the revolution, the radicals in the salon see a golden opportunity to rethink not just a few political rules and ministerial portfolios, but how people relate to each other and how the wealth and resources of society are distributed. Against the Party of Movement types, these more radical salon revolutionaries believe the revolution that overthrew the anicen regime was not just about creating the conditions for more reform, but for more revolution. The ranks of this faction of salon revolutionaries look to the streets for power and possibility, even if they themselves come from different socioeconomic circumstances. Radical leaders like Lenin and Trotsky and Robespierre and Danton may have cheered the streets and riled up the streets, but they were not from the streets.

So let us leave the salons then and turn to the streets. Know in the main, the dominant emotion in the salons after the revolution was anxiety over how to restore order as quickly as possible. For the folks out in the streets, it’s not that at all. At least in the beginning, it continues to just be euphoria. It’s a revolution. We did it! Anything and everything is possible. The folks out in the street are often slow to catch on how much the elites in the salons want to limit the breadth and depth of the revolutionary outcome. Because remember, there was a prevailing unity built around a few shared simple ideas, like liberty, freedom, equality, bread, and land. In the wake of the revolution, the elites now stepping into power will continue to shout those same slogans and say, what we are doing now is fulfilling those promises. But those words always meant very different things, in the salon and in the streets. It will take days, weeks, months, and sometimes even years for the streets to realize that actually, we are not getting from this revolution what we thought we were getting. Everything on our list of grievances and our list of hopes has been dropped, while everything on your list of grievances and your list of hopes has been enshrined. Thus, the euphoria and optimism give way to anger and disappointment, and the seeds of the second wave of revolution are planted amidst the manure of unmet popular expectations.

But even had the elite revolutionaries of the salon say, you know what? Let’s advance the agenda of the lower classes first. After all, they provided the popular forces necessary to overthrow the old regime — you know, just, if they said that — We would still run into the entropy of victory because the people are not a monolith, and out in the streets there are many different kinds of people doing many different kinds of things. And even setting aside all The People from the people who don’t support the revolution or don’t care about the revolution, there are still many different people who make up The People. And so like on a very basic level, we have urban workers and rural peasants — they’re all a part of the popular masses, but that’s very different factions, very different classes. They all may be salt of the earth commoners, but they have very different expectations that are in fact often in direct conflict with each other. If we go talk to urban workers, what they want is cheap and plentiful bread, and in fact, a revolutionary policy they might support is sending armed cadres out into the countryside to requisition grain, to keep bread cheap and plentiful.

The peasants, meanwhile, hate all that. They absolutely hate it when armed people come around and take all their grain. What they really want is land, and to be paid more for their grain, and then to be left to their own devices. There’s also, of course, often a more conservative worldview out there in the villages, especially because the peasants in the villages are the peasants who stayed in the villages as opposed to the peasant who left the villages to go off in search of work elsewhere. So in those villages, we have people often rooted in old social traditions. They might be in favor of tossing out rich landlords and redistributing the land — they are, after all, hugely radical on that front — but in the smaller scale social order, in terms of husbands ruling wives and fathers ruling sons and the family structure and religion, they’re interested in keeping most of that intact. And so when it’s time for the revolution to pay off, things that are good for the urban worker wing of The People and things that are good for the rural peasant wing of The People are diametrically opposed, and will likely lead each side to conclude that they will have to fight the other side in order to get what they want.

So after the revolution is won, entropy is now entering the system along political lines and class lines: conservatives are looking to consolidate and hold, progressives are looking to change and advance. But hopping off the political axis of interest and the economic axis of interest, there is also, in any revolution, geographic divides. Once the fundamental binding ties of a former political regime are broken, everything can be called into question, especially when we are talking about revolutions that involve independence or national self determination. So we see this in South America, where Gran Colombia suddenly becomes Venezuela and Ecuador and Columbia. In the British colonies, remember, there’s Virginia and Massachusetts and South Carolina. Are these actually going to be bound together in a new polity after the overthrow of the old polity? Russia was a multinational empire. Overthrowing Tsar Nicholas meant we now have Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians, who are thinking to themselves, hey, maybe Ukrainians and Lithuanians and Georgians ought to be in charge of Ukraine, Lithuania, and Georgia.

Who the us over here is and who the them over there is changes overnight with an ancien regime is overthrown, especially if it involves the expulsion of a foreign imperial power. Everyone’s brain immediately remaps everything and suddenly over here and over take on different meanings. So when they all rose up in independence, the people of Gran Colombia viewed themselves as separate and different and unified against Spain. But once Spain is gone, we’re Venezuelans and Ecuadorians and Colombians. These geographic divisions then feed into one of the great post-revolutionary political questions: where will power now reside? Should it be centralized and run from a large urban capital, or devolved down to the local level? This is that age old centralist/federalist divide. Because there will be those who think it vital and necessary to have a centralized authority, and in fact, maybe consider the goal of the revolution to be increasing the centralized power of any new sovereign. On the other side, there will be people who think the whole point of the revolution was to break such centralized power and let local regions and states and cities call their own shots. After the revolution, does Léon have to take orders from Paris? Do Bostonians have to take orders from Virginians? Do the Russians have to rule Ukraine?

Now, the interesting thing about all these political and economic and geographic divisions that are gonna lead to the entropy of victory is that it’s very difficult to map where any single individual is going to wind up on the post-revolutionary ideological spectrum. So some Virginia planters like George Washington and James Madison are gonna become political centralists, whereas other Virginia planters like Patrick Henry and George Mason are gonna become staunch federalists. When we look at Russian SRs, Bolsheviks, and Mensheviks through the lens of socioeconomic class, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. They all look, sound, and dress the same. They all live in the same kind of places, they all had the same level of education, they all basically read the same books and do the same kinds of work, and yet, all of them are gonna want to kill each other. In the French Revolution, Jacobins and Girondins wind up at each other’s throats even though there’s no way socioeconomically to distinguish them. And then up in the upper classes, how does a Lafayette, who’s a wealthy noble, or a Jacque Laffite, who’s a rich banker, wind up in the Party of Movement after the revolution of 1830, whereas a simple bourgeois intellectual like Francois Guizot winds up in the Party of Resistance? Why in the case of post-tsarist Russia does one Georgian leader think that Georgia should be truly independent in this new thing called the USSR while another thinks that the USSR should be unified, and ruled centrally from Moscow?

These questions can’t be explained by where people grew up or what their socioeconomic class is. A lot of it comes down to individual biography, character, and choices. So we must admit that at a certain point, individual power and influences come into play. Material interests and even political ideology is always mixed in with interpersonal conflict and ambition, where it’s not solely about political or ideological differences between Mensheviks and and Bolsheviks and SRs, or the Girondins and the Mountain, but more about which people are actually going to be in power. Who is going to get to be the minister of what? Which faction is going to enjoy the perk of making final decisions? This stuff does matter, especially if you really don’t like somebody on like a personal level and don’t want them to have power. Those kinds of interpersonal conflicts can actually precede ideological or geographic or religious or class considerations — those all become post hoc justifications. People sometimes just don’t like each other. A lot of Mensheviks became Mensheviks because they didn’t like Lenin. Now, I took pains during the Russian Revolutionary series to establish that there are in fact political differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, but a lot of it was personality, not principle.

So the entropy of victory sets in as soon as victory is won. Well, okay, okay, it might take several hours. But it sets in so quickly because while it’s easy to agree that the great idiot needs to go — that he was an obstacle to all our hopes and dreams — it’s much harder to agree on what happens next, because there are so many competing hopes and dreams out there. And the entropy of victory sets us up for what we’re gonna talk about next week, because divisions among the various revolutionary factions are absolutely going to provide the opportunity conservative reactionaries out there in the tall grass have been waiting for, to undo the revolution. And that means civil war. The divisions between the revolutionaries are also going to inform, and be informed by, our new post-revolutionary regimes relations with their foreign neighbors.

So next week we’re gonna be talking about war. Because war always seems to follow pretty hot on the heels of revolution: international wars with neighboring powers, civil wars between revolutionaries and reactionaries, civil wars between competing revolutionary factions. It’s extremely difficult, though not impossible, to get through a revolution without a war.

And it is extremely difficult for that war to not spin around and further radicalize the revolution.

 

 

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. Do you love drinking coffee every morning? I sure do, and if you’re like me, you have to check out Trade Coffee. Trade delivers coffee from the finest local roasters from around the country, making it supremely easy to get the best coffee in the country. I mean, the ease and convenience of Trade is unrivaled. They partner with top rated independent roasters to send you coffee you’ll love on your preferred schedule, and always fresh. They’ll send it to you ground, they’ll send it to you whole, they’ll send it to you how you want it, when you want it. This week I got a shipment from PT’s coffee roasting company from the great state of Kansas. I got their Flatlander blend, which has hints of tangerine and bittersweet chocolate and roasted almonds, very good stuff.

So upgrade your coffee today with Trade Coffee and let them take the guesswork out of finding your perfect cup. Right now Trade is offering our listeners a total of $30 off your subscription. Plus free shipping at drinktrade.com/revolutions. That’s drinktrade.com/revolutions for $30 off your subscription to the best coffees in the country.

drinktrade.com/revolutions.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 6: Victory and Defeat

So the revolution has come. All potential compromises, accommodations, and settlements have been spurned. All off-ramps have been missed. Not only has the potential revolutionary energy stoked by years of resistance and frustration to the sovereign grown to uncontainable levels, but the trigger has now been pulled, turning all that potential energy into kinetic energy. Elites are now rushing through palace corridors and hosting feverish meetings in their salons. Regular people are pouring out into the streets, erecting barricades, tossing pavement stones, blockading neighborhoods, signing up for revolutionary armies.

These are the heady days when no one really knows what happened, what’s happening or what’s going to happen. Will the regime emerge from this chaotic moment dead or alive? It’s high impossible to predict. But as I said last week, one of the main things that the revolutionary trigger does, is open the final contest to decide the fate of the regime, whether the sovereign still holds a preponderance of force. Who wins and who loses this brute force determines the fate of the regime and the revolution. Now we know from any game, fight, or sporting match, that not only does one side win because of the things the winner did right — their superior talent and strategies and tactics — but also because of the things the loser did wrong — their inferior talent and strategies and tactics. The narrative of any sporting match can be framed as a story of what the winning side did, right, or a story about what the losing side did wrong, but always, always, always, it’s a mix of the two.

So as we discuss this final revolutionary contest, we must talk on the one hand about the superiority of the forces rising up, as well as the inferiority of the forces falling down.

Now, on the rising upside, we have what I have variously described as a cross-class alliance, a revolutionary coalition, and a full blown shadow society. By that I mean that every socioeconomic level, branch, category, whatever, has a revolutionary wing from the uppermost reaches of the ruling class on down to the lowest peasants and workers. In between, there will be revolutionary lawyers, students, shopkeepers, administrators, merchants, clergy artists, journalists, clerks, artisans, servants, bankers, professors — all of them springing into action to advance the revolutionary cause in their specific socioeconomic niche. At the very tippy top of this vast cross-class revolutionary coalition, we might find a dissident member of the royal family ready to replace their cousin on the throne.

They might be surrounded by rich, educated, influential supporters, each of whom are ready to take over the ministry of finance or justice or the interior. This then extends on down the line through merchants and businessmen aiming for profitable new arrangements, through middle class professionals ready to take over the administrative functions of the state, young students and clerks ready to staff those mid-level and lower level functionaries, on down to workers wanting to force changes in their factories and peasants redefining the terms of land ownership and authority in their home villages.

Now, at every level of this cross-class coalition, people are making risk/reward calculations. Now I am not myself a huge proponent of rational choice theory, where people are sitting down and gaming out scenarios and making purely logical choices based off of like mathematical equations. I don’t think humans actually work that way, but risk/reward calculations are present, they are doing some of the work. If you’re watching a society advance through all these stages of disequilibrium to shocks to the system and then reach this trigger point, it might still seem like there’s a very low likelihood of revolutionary success, and no real personal advantage or reward to be won. This is a high risk, low reward scenario — and in that case, you’ll probably sit it out. But if you look around at your society and decide, hey, there’s a good chance of revolutionary success and enormous possible rewards and advantages to be won — this is a low risk, high reward scenario and you might say, yeah, okay, let’s go for it.

But this is a calculation that’s made by various members of the cross-class coalition each in their own way and each for their own reasons. Because it is not the case that everyone in this coalition has the same interests, far from it. Our proverbial Duc d’Orléans, that royal cousin waiting in the wings is thinking about how wonderful it will be to sit on the throne to decide lofty matters of state and play the great game of international diplomacy, to have everyone bow to you while you bow to literally no one.

These are not the same interests as, oh, let’s say a rural peasant, who is mostly interested in getting a little bit more land. Or the interests of the urban worker, who’s mostly interested in higher wages and cheaper bread. Or the interests of middle class professionals, often eyeing possible material gains, yes, but mostly interested in gaining access to political power and influence they have likely been denied previously. They want to participate, to have a real voice in politics.

And when you look at all these interests, they’re often quite contradictory. The members of the breakaway faction of the ruling class want to wield power, not share it with social inferiors. The land for the peasants, where’s it gonna come from? Well, probably from the real estate portfolios of the ruling class families, some of whom might be in that revolutionary coalition. Now there’s of course always gonna be tension between urban workers who want to pay less for bread, and rural peasants who want to be paid more for their grain.

So if this coalition has such divergent interests, and everyone’s risk/reward calculation is based on wildly different factors, how are they even united?

Well, I think there are several unifying categories. There might be geographic ties, where we over here see the sovereign as representing them over there. This is obviously a huge factor in fights over things like independence and national self-determination. All of those other conflicting interests are papered over by shared geographic proximity or ethnic identity, or the sovereign is seen as a fundamentally foreign object they can all get together to remove.

This can also take on a religious tone, as religious differences often follow geographic and ethnic contours, so that religious doctrines and belief become binding touchstones for the revolutionary coalition against those heretics over there. Religious doctrines can also be seen as a subset of one of the major unifying ties, just abstract principles and ideas, which often spring from those new ideas that help fuel all the political disequilibrium in the first place. We’ve talked through so many late 18th century and early 19th century revolutions we know that things like liberty and equality, as words, as concepts and slogans exert a major unifying effect. Now, these ideas need to be vague enough and universal enough that everyone can feed their specific interests through that abstract slogan. So, both the banker and the worker, the landlord and the peasant, might say that they are fighting for liberty or equality while they are talking about very different things.

But what I really think brings them all together, really fuses them into a single force capable of overthrowing the regime, is the fundamental belief that the sovereign is an obstacle. The sovereign is an obstacle that has to be removed. Whatever it is you want: liberty, equality bread, land, power, respect, wealth, the sovereign stands in the way. It is an obstacle. This takes us back to those two big things causing equilibrium: resistance and frustration. The sovereign has either been doing things we hate or the sovereign has not been doing things we want, and we have all now, all of us, each in our own ways, decided that the only option left is removing the sovereign.

People at every rank and class have come to believe that the main thing preventing them from having all the things they want… is the sovereign. It is an obstacle that must be removed, and everyone agrees on that.

Now, one interesting point I want to make before moving on is that I have not found it to be the case that this initial revolutionary coalition is fused together by a single charismatic leader. Now, I’m speaking specifically here of the first revolutionary wave that rises up and overthrows the ancien regime. With one notable exception, the cross-class revolutionary coalition will have leaders — some of them may even enjoy a popular following — but they are invariably just one among many. First wave revolutionary coalitions have many different leaders, most of whom no one has ever heard of. The major charismatic leaders who do become unifying revolutionary figures: Cromwell, Washington, Louverture, Bolivar, [???], Lenin — they make their names after the revolution has started. They do not make the revolution with their names. Even someone like Washington, as unifying a charismatic revolutionary leaders we’re likely to find, was not the one out there leading the people of New England into armed revolt in 1775. The people of Massachusetts were not shouting “Long live Washington,” at Lexington and Concord; they’d probably never even heard of a guy.

Now, the notable exception here is the role Francisco Madero played in the Mexican Revolution. Not that Madero himself was such a charismatic revolutionary leader, that he commanded unrivaled authority in the revolutionary coalition, because he really did not — but given the particulars of the Mexican Revolution, emerging as it did from a rigged presidential election, Madero became a symbol. His name and face were absolutely a unifying element to the Mexican Revolution. People were absolutely shouting “Viva Madero!” as they rode off into battle.

So that brings us to the fact that people are now riding out into battle. The great physical challenge to the sovereign has been launched, the contest over who has a preponderance of force has begun. This means that the cross-class revolutionary coalition must be able to produce armed forces capable of taking on the sovereign’s armed forces. There must be enough willing volunteers to risk not just their socioeconomic position, but to risk their lives. And by virtue of the very nature of clashes like this, that means that they must come overwhelmingly from that popular force now exploding into the streets, what has been unleashed by the trigger, the popular forces that make the revolution a true revolution.

These armed forces can take several different victorious forms depending on the needs of each revolution. They can be whole, regularized armies: the New Model Army, the Continental Army, Madero’s Army of the North. They can be volunteer citizen militia groups, the most famous of these being the French National Guard. And as we saw, the National Guard was such a decisive force that you could basically predict how a revolution would go based on the loyalty of the National Guard. There are also semi-organized but mostly irregular forces operating on their own revolutionary initiative, neighborhood groups, building barricades, and watching out for their own quarter. This probably also includes political parties, who organize inside of existing military structures in the interests of fermenting mutiny and unrest. We’ve seen that in groups from the Levelers to the Bolsheviks. And then finally, we have our good old fashioned unorganized mobs: protestors, demonstrators, and marchers appearing so spontaneously and in such huge numbers that the regime simply cannot contend with them.

The women marching on Versailles in October 1789, the women marching through Petrograd in February 1917. Whatever form they take, however organized they are, whatever weapons they have, all of these forces serve the same function. They challenge the sovereign’s claim to a preponderance of force, and that means that they are the force that will make or break the revolution. It’s why the popular element is so important. No popular element, no force strong enough to openly challenge the regime’s forces.

But, like, how can the sovereign possibly lose this contest? They are the sovereign. They control the army and the navy. They command the resources of the entire polity. All existing social hierarchies, economic production, chains of command, terminate with them. Their word is law, and it’s been that way for, like, decades. The sovereign’s ability to project physical force inside of their polity is quite literally unrivaled, it’s why they’re the sovereign. So how on earth can they possibly lose?

Well, again, first things first, they usually don’t. That’s why the number of failed revolutions and revolts, insurrections, uprisings, rebellions, et cetera, far outnumber the successful ones. But when we come across a very specific set of political, economic, and social circumstances, and those circumstances are presided over by one of our very special great idiots of history, a sovereign can lose, and then does lose.

The reason they lose is that while the ties binding the forces of revolution grow stronger and wider, the ties binding supporters of the sovereign wither and disintegrate. So, just as the revolutionary cross-class coalition coalesces around a few lofty abstractions and the fundamental belief that the sovereign is a obstacle to peace, land, justice, equality, bread, and/or freedom, the corresponding cross-class alliance that has propped up the regime all these years is now breaking apart. By the time the final trigger is pulled, years of resistance or frustration have already pushed former supporters into the ranks of either the opposition — or more probably, the ranks of the apolitical dropouts. And just as with the revolutionary coalition, I’m talking about people up and down the socioeconomic line, lawyers, journalists, peasants, workers, bankers, clerks, servants, a bunch of people who had previously defended the regime and supported the regime, each in their own way, and each in their own niche, now start to passively go quiet. They start to care a little bit less, or they start actively defecting to the revolution.

Once the trigger is pulled, push is truly coming to shove, and the alliance that has long supported the sovereign runs its own risk and reward scenarios to decide what they should do. And since we are inevitably dealing with a uniquely incompetent, weak, and ineffective sovereign, would-be supporters often failed to see the advantage of continuing to be die hard supporters, because it means they will likely die. Hard.

Now, do all of these supporters have the same interests? No, of course not. Just as with the revolutionary coalition, they range from a sovereign trying to hold onto the throne, all the power and influence and wealth that comes with it, sitting adjacent to ministers, advisors, and high ranking officials who are all about to lose their august status. There are gonna be business interests connected to the existing regime who will suffer under a different regime. But there are also like, bakers, with a contract to supply a palace; prosecutors who will lose their positions; maybe a customs official who will be replaced. Even village elders who have a pretty nice plot of land and good standing in the local community might tend to prefer the present sovereign.

There are also other abstractions out there binding them together, things like tradition, duty, obedience. Maybe religious principles are coming into play that hold supporters together against the rising revolutionary tide.

But here’s the problem: those binding abstractions and those individual interests are rapidly losing their potency. And even if that doesn’t push them into the revolutionary ranks, It at least pushes them out of active support for the regime. It makes them willing to shrug their shoulders and acquiesce to the final outcome of the contest without too much fuss one way or the other.

So the moral, economic, and political ties binding together, the sovereign’s coalition of supporters is unraveling. But even still, right up to the moment that the trigger is pulled, the sovereign is still a mighty force. The sheer number of rifles, pistols, swords, cannons and bayonets they command invariably dwarfs anything the revolutionaries can put into the field. I mean, look, we’re talking about the entire British army and Royal Navy against whatever the colonials are trying to scramble together. The French Army against protestors roaming angrily around Paris? The tsar’s combined military forces presently organized to wage a world war against a few malcontents in Petrograd and Moscow? And this is not even counting yet their police forces, elite bodyguards, secret services, and Black Hundred style reactionary paramilitary groups, all of whom are well practiced in the bashing of heads.

On paper, the balance of forces is nowhere near balanced. The sovereign commands so much more. More men, more weapons, more munitions, more resources, more everything. So how can this on paper dominance fail so spectacularly?

Well, it fails thanks to a corrosive trifecta called loss of faith, loss of trust, and the mother of them all, loss of will.

Now, remember, the deal here is that the sovereign, at the moment, is uniquely weak and incompetent. That’s why they’re being taken out. That’s why the revolution is gonna succeed. And people inside the regime’s,armed forces can sense that weakness, they can sense that incompetence. So they begin to lose faith. This includes those who might in nearly any other circumstance support the regime, or who reluctantly still support the regime even though their hearts are not really into it anymore. So, rank and file soldiers, non-commissioned officers, senior officers and staff, on up to commanders in chief, they’ve all been watching political events with growing dismay and disillusionment. And they are rapidly losing faith in the sovereign. And I often think here of General de Marmont, from the Revolution of 1830, who read the Four Ordinances with shock and dismay, and said to a friend, “Well, I suppose I’m obliged to now go get killed for them.” And then he was in fact ordered to lead the armed repression of Paris, even though he wanted nothing to do with the Four Ordinances and thought it was totally stupid. He did his duty, and people like General de Marmont may be instinctively and temperamentally supportive of the sovereign, but their own mounting exasperation with the sovereign’s inability to manage events might start to produce in them this thought:

I’m a professional soldier, loyal to the sovereign of my kingdom, empire, or republic, whoever that may be.

Once senior officers start to lose faith in the individual presently on the throne, and realize that their professional loyalties are merely to the abstract concept of the sovereign, and that they owe their faith and fidelity to that rather than the present great idiot sitting on the throne, it’s pretty bad news for the great idiot presently sitting on the throne.

Now, even if they have not completely lost faith, and they are inclined to defend the present great idiot at all costs, they may yet be doused with another corrosive acid, and that is loss of trust. And where loss of faith is looking up at the sovereign, loss of trust is looking down at the rank and file. We’ve seen this repeatedly over the course of the podcast. Sure, there are battalions of soldiers mustered under arms and ready to be deployed, but what happens if we actually deploy them? So many times we’ve seen loyal officers assessing the morale of their soldiers and reporting back up the chain of command, uh, if I order them to fire on the people, it’s entirely likely they will mutiny me and shoot me instead. It’s the men, sir. They can’t be trusted.

And this is often what truly paralyzes the sovereign’s ability to deploy their overwhelming force: when they cannot be sure that those forces won’t immediately defect. And this is not theoretical, we saw it happen a bunch of times, where protesting citizens are on one side of a street and soldiers are raid against them on the other side of the street and then they just physically switch sides, they like literally cross the street. And if you don’t trust your soldiers to stay loyal, kill who you’ve ordered them to kill, well, it turns out your on paper strength does not really exist in real life.

And that brings us to the moment of defeat for the sovereign. And this is when their will disappears.

Now, this is not an original idea, this focus on will, and it’s a point I’ve so often seen and become so attached to that I actually wrote about it in Hero of Two Worlds when I got to the point when the British we’re gonna call it quits after Yorktown and I figure rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m just gonna quote this paragraph, which I wrote to open up chapter nine:

War is a content of wills. Weapons, armies, fleets, and fortresses are simply the means by which one breaks the will of their enemy. A generation hence, Clausewitz would write war has three broad objectives: “Destroying the enemy’s armed forces; occupying their country; and breaking their will to continue the struggle.” But the first two are merely the means by which one achieves the third, the only true goal of war — breaking the enemy’s will to continue the struggle. Victory and defeat are subjective psychological events, not objective material conditions. If the enemy’s will is broken, a million canons will sit idle. But if their will is not broken, it does not matter if they are disarmed or occupied. It does not matter how naked and defenseless they stand. They will simply kneel down, pick up a rock and throw it.

And so the final moment of truth comes for our beleaguered and besieged sovereigns. Not when all their forces have been wiped out, but when their will to fight on dissolves. Maybe they are told that, thanks to a loss of faith or a loss of trust, further action is impossible. Maybe they themselves don’t want to commit mass murder to stay in power. Maybe their closest friends and advisors are saying, sire, it’s, it’s over. It’s time to sign this piece of paper announcing to the world that it’s over, that you, the obstacle are going away. And even if there are still armies to be deployed, money to be raised, plans to be drawn up… there’s simply no more will left to do any of that.

Now, in terms of the revolutions that we have covered, the period between the trigger being pulled and the sovereign’s will disappearing, can take anywhere from several days, to several months to many, many years. This contest over the preponderance of force, that final conflict, goes on for as long as the sovereign can maintain it. Charles X in 1830 and Louis Philippe in 1848? They gave up and abdicated the throne in a matter of days. Tsar Nicholas held out for just over a week, from late February to early March 1917. Porfirio Diaz waged a war against Madero’s army for several months before calling it quits in May of 1911 and sailing into exile.

But in other revolutions, this period takes years and years. Louis XVI salvaged his position by coming to Paris within days of the Fall of the Bastille and saying, yes, yes, I accept it all. No more fighting. I am now your citizen king. But it wasn’t until August of 1792 that he really gave up. The contest between Crown and Parliament and the American colonies lasted from the trigger in April of 1775 to Cornwallis’s defeat in October 1781, and even then, it was several more years before it was clear that hostilities would not resume. The wars of Spanish American Independence continued off and on for more than a decade before the Spanish sovereign claiming authority over the Americas finally called it quits. And our old good friend King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland? Well, he never gave up. He never acknowledged defeat, right until the moment they chopped his head off.

The sovereign finally giving up, losing their will to fight, admitting they have lost the contest over who controls a preponderance of force, marks the victory for the forces of revolution. It sets off a wave of euphoria up and down the line. People are ecstatic. The great obstacle has now been removed. All their dreams can come true.

Except, what happens next?

With the unifying obstacle removed, the conflicting, competing, and contradictory interests of all the people in that cross-class revolutionary coalition are exposed for all to see, and we all know what happens after that.

Say it with me now: the entropy of victory.

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible. I love audiobooks. I spend a lot of time sitting and reading, but sometimes I can’t sit and read. But I still want to read. So audiobooks are great for walking around doing chores and traveling. I’ve been on and off of a lot of airplanes recently, and audiobooks are great when you’re stuck sitting in one place, but also want to not be there mentally. So all Audible members get access to a growing selection of audiobooks, audible originals, and podcasts that are included with membership, and you can listen to all you want and get more added every month. You can also listen to exciting new titles like Monsters and How to Tame Them from Kevin Hart. Even if being a better you isn’t something you regularly think about, Kevin Hart’s signature Real Talk and wit will teach you how to tame your negative thoughts and patterns. No near death experience required.

So check out Kevin Hart’s Monsters and How to Tame Them today on Audible. New members can try it free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/revolutions or text REVOLUTIONS to 500-500 that again, audible.com/revolutions. Or text REVOLUTIONS to 500-500 to try audible free for 30 days audible.com/revolutions.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Green Chef, the number one meal kit for eating well. And just so you know, Green Chef is now owned by Hello Fresh, and with a wider array of meal plans to choose from, there’s something out there for everyone. Green Chef puts together meal kits fit for any diet: whether you’re keto, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, Mediterranean, or gluten free. They also have a bunch of fast and fit meals that’ll be ready in less than 25 minutes and are all under 700 calories. But all the recipes they have are real time savers. They have pre-measured and pre-made sauces and spices. All the directions are simple to follow and they make it easy to get the kind of flavors you would expect from a restaurant right at home. So it’s getting kind of chilly out there, and soup season is here, so on the menu this week, we have creamy Italian pork soup, which has got cauliflower, kale, tomato, mushroom broth, and I know it’ll be fresh, it’ll be easy to make, it’ll be warm, satisfying, delicious, like always.

So go to greenchef.com/revolutions135 and use code REVOLUTIONS135 to get $135 off across five boxes. And your first box will ship free. That again, go to greenchef.com/revolutions135 and use code Revolutions135 to get $135 off across five boxes, and your first box ships free.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 5: the Triggers

So far in the appendices, we’ve taken our once successful sovereign regimes to the precipice of revolution. About ten, fifteen, maybe twenty odd years before the revolution, destabilizing disequilibrium enters the picture, caused by an increasing inability of the sovereign to balance competing political interests in the ruling class, or manage the prevailing and ever changing socioeconomic conditions.

Then, two to three years or so before the revolution breaks out, this unstable system gets hit with a shock that hardens political divisions, draws sharp battlelines, and makes peaceful reconciliation increasingly impossible. This was especially true for those challenging the regime — not just because they were afraid of what might happen if they backed down, but because they now saw the sovereign as weak, incompetent, and ineffective. They saw how the sovereign behaved to all these crises and shocks and deemed them uniquely vulnerable to attack. So failing to press their advantage would be an unforgivably missed opportunity. And so everyone pushed on towards the precipice.

And today, we are gonna talk about the moment everyone plunges over the edge together. The thing that takes all of this from potential revolutionary energy to kinetic revolutionary energy, and that is: the triggers.

Now, before we get into this, let’s remind ourselves that nothing we have talked about so far guarantees a revolution. In fact, even at this late hour, no revolution necessarily follows from any of the conditions we’ve described so far. A sovereign can manage its political equilibrium in perpetuity. If disequilibrium enters the picture, the sovereign can regain its footing. It can change, adapt and reform. Even after the shock to the system has come around, there’s no guarantee that the crisis will meet a dramatic revolutionary trigger.

More than anything else, revolutions are rare. They’re so rare, they’re super rare. And that’s partly why they’re so fascinating, because they are so uncommon. The uncommon draws our attention. The common place does not. So most of the time the volcano, gurgles and shakes, but ultimately does not erupt. The logic is never, if there is potential revolutionary energy, then there will ultimately be kinetic revolutionary energy. We must always, always, always keep this in mind. If you’re a gambler and you would like to make a fortune, always bet against revolution. Besides if you lose that bet and a revolution happens, maybe the revolution will wipe out all your debts. So either way you can’t lose.

But obviously we are here talking about the times revolutions did break out, when all the conditions were ripe and a trigger kicked that energy from potential to kinetic. So I wanna start today by running quickly through the trigger points as I see them through all of our various revolutions, and then offer some thoughts on what we see. Now what’s interesting about a revolutionary trigger is that it’s simultaneously only obvious in retrospect — because at the time, it’s nearly impossible to tell if this is just a dramatic event or if it’s a revolutionary trigger. We won’t know until we know the future. But at the same time, the trigger also needs to have enough dramatic impact in the moment that people recognize it at the time as a big deal. Something important that has happened.

So nearly all the triggers we’ll talk about today were recognized as such pretty quickly, even if nobody planned for them to happen, and they just sort of blew up at random. Because that’s been a running theme of the show: that certain conditions prevail, that many people are actively pushing towards a revolution, but when the deal actually goes down, almost no one predicts or plans the actual, literal trigger in advance. They’re not planned. They’re simply capitalized upon by opportunistic improvisation. Revolutions are rarely scripted in advance. They are almost always adlibbed.

So as we go through what I think of as the triggers of the revolutions that we’ve covered so far in the show, your mileage may vary. You might disagree with me here and there. But I am gonna offer what my read is on all of these events.

So in the English Revolution, for example, we have this 1639 to 1641 crisis period, after this shock to the system that was the Bishop’s War. There’s the Short Parliament, the impeachment of William Laud, the trial and execution of Stratford, the rebellion in Ireland — which I actually referred to in the podcast specifically as the direct trigger of the civil war.

But I think the even more direct trigger was when King Charles showed up at Parliament on January the fourth, 1642, to arrest the five members. This attempted usurpation of parliamentary rights sparked outrage in the city of London. Students, apprentices, journeymen, and clerks all took to the streets in the days that followed, creating such a tumult that King Charles and his family had to secretly flee the city on January 10th. And this is when things went from confrontation to revolution. The sovereign was driven from his capital, leading to parliament’s militia ordinance, which gave them the right to raise armed forces without the need to consult their runaway king, and that directly set up the civil war. Charles himself, as we know, would not return to London until he himself faced trial and execution.

Now, the trigger for the American Revolution is obviously the shot heard round the world, the battles of Lexington and Concord. This is famous, we made it famous, it’s almost impossible to disentangle ourselves from it. Though it is worth mentioning that the battle of Lexington and Concord was actually the fourth time British regulars had gone out to secure colonial munition. There was the Powder Alarm around Boston in September, 1774; then again in Portmouth in December, 1774; then Salem in February, 1775; and only then do we come to the events in Lexington and Concord in April of 1775. It’s also worth noting that just five days later there was a thing called the Gunpowder Incident down in Williamsburg, Virginia, pitting Lord Dunmore against a militia raised by Patrick Henry.

So, why was Lexington and Concord the trigger, and all those other things. Just things that happened? Who knows? That’s just the way things go.

Now in the French Revolution, it’s also impossible to disentangle ourselves from the cataclysmic, earth-shattering Fall of the Bastille in July 1789. That is the traditional, historical, dramatic beginning of the French Revolution, even if a bunch of stuff leading up to that moment is also a part of the French Revolution. But the Fall of the Bastille was not really the trigger, was it? The trigger came three days earlier, when Louis XVI fired Controller-General Jacques Necker. That’s what set off all that decisive unrest in Paris, as the Parisians believed Necker’s dismissal was a prelude to the king shuttering the National Assembly and ordering regular soldiers to occupy Paris. So when the King made this incredibly provocative move, they rose up in defense of the revolution that had only just then gotten going.

Now, none of these first three triggers was premeditated; as I said, most things are improvised on the fly — just things happen, and people respond. Now, in future appendices, we’ll get to the second revolutionary waves that often fall with the first waves, and many of those involve triggers that are, in fact, planned in advance: the Insurrection of August the 10th, Lenin’s, October Revolution, et cetera, et cetera. But the first time we get to something that seems truly premeditated comes with the Haitian Revolution. It arrives in August of 1791 with the Bois Caïman ceremony. There was no immediate threat from the colonial authorities that drove the Haitian slaves into revolt. There was no especially provocative thing they did. The slaves just saw an opportunity, got together, and they did it.

Now with Spanish American Independence, it’s obviously going to be a vast array of events out there, because we’re talking about things that unfolded across an entire continent. But we can point to those first cries of freedom in 1808 and 1809 and 1810, mostly triggered by news from Spain that there was this new national junta that had taken over, and was inviting participation from the American component to the Spanish Empire. In the specific case of Grand Columbia, though we can turn to April 1810, when a small group from Spain arrived claiming to represent a regency council, that other people on board the same ship told the locals… didn’t really exist, it wasn’t actually a thing. And so within days, a large crowd was marching to confront the Captain General in Caracas. They demanded their own junta that would be answerable only to the king himself, who wasn’t actually in power. This got them all rolling downhill towards a formal declaration of independence by the end of the year.

Now in 1830, we have as clear a cut trigger as we’re ever likely to find: it’s King Charles X publishing the Four Ordinances on July the 26th, 1830, which immediately sets off a wave of popular resistance, the formation of barricades by the people of Paris, and the self-directed recall of the National Guard soon to be placed under the command of old General Lafayette. The trigger here is easy. It’s the Four Ordinances. And once again, the regime has done something provocative and people are rising up in response.

Now in 1848, we know the final crisis revolved around the Banquet Campaign, with Francois Guizot ordering the last and biggest of the planned banquets shuttered in February 1848. But though tumultuous unrest started immediately, on February the 22nd, it was not actually clear what the ultimate result of this unrest would be, nor how much, if anything, the regime would have to concede in order to restore order. And this was true until about 9:30 PM on February the 23rd, 1848, when French troops fired on Parisian demonstrators, leaving scores of dead and wounded. This moment was referred to then as the massacre of the Capucines, and it turned the crisis into a revolution. This is the moment. This is the trigger. Louis Philippe was riding outta Paris into exile by noon the very next day.

And as for the rest of Europe, as we talked about in Season Seven, when you make a circuit around the continent, you can basically track the beginning of each revolution in Germany or Italy or Austria or Hungary by how long it took to deliver news bulletins from Paris. That was the trigger there. What happened in Paris?

And the third time we see news bulletins serving as a revolutionary trigger — I think the first was Spanish America, the second was central and southern Europe in 1848 — is the collapse of the Second Empire into the Third Republic, which began as soon as news of the Battle of Sedan arrived. As with Spanish America, it was similarly triggered by news of a massive political vacuum opening up. The emperor had been captured, what are we gonna do now? Let’s declare another republic.

The trigger for the Paris Commune, on the other hand, was far more standard issue, where the regime does something and people mobilized to resist. And it’s in fact very similar to the American Revolution: the regime was trying to take the cannons of Paris the same way the British had tried to secure the powder of the American colonies, and the people rose up in opposition.

Now, the Mexican Revolution followed immediately on the heels of the clearly rigged presidential election of 1910. And while the arrest of Francisco Madero and thousands of his supporters in June 1910 probably planted some very fertile revolutionary seeds, the real final trigger that drove Madero and his inner circle into revolution was the National Congress ratifying the fraudulent election in October 1910. This is when they reelected Porfirio Díaz to the presidency and more provocatively made the hated Ramon Corral, vice president and de facto heir. This was the immediate trigger for Madero to publish the plan of San Luis Potosi and raise a revolutionary army in the north.

Now, the Russian Revolution of 1905 comes with one of the most infamous of all triggers, the events of Bloody Sunday. This is when the tsar’s troops fired on unarmed protestors and drove nearly all segments of Russian society into a vast revolutionary push to demand fundamental political reform.

But what’s kind of funny about the trigger of the revolution of 1917, one of the greatest revolutions in human history, is that it was not about the regime doing something provocative or some apocalyptic piece of news from abroad. It’s just that February 23rd, 1917 Petrograd was just… it was just a really nice day. It was warm and comfortable after a very long and very cold winter. So it’s weird to go through all these and then write down that the trigger for the 1917 revolution was just that it was a nice day, but that’s what happened. It’s why the protests surrounding International Women’s Day were able to roll so seamlessly into demonstrations from the Petrograd Garrison. It was so nice! Everybody wanted to be outside. History, man it’s crazy.

So these triggers all come in many shapes and sizes, but what nearly all of them have in common is that the sovereign made some kind of final, provocative move — this isn’t true of all of them, but it’s true of most of them. The trigger that triggers revolution is almost always the regime doing something. They try to take our guns, they try to take our rights, they try to take our lives. The initial trigger is pulled by the regime. And the explosion of kinetic revolutionary energy that bursts forth is almost always a defensive response to some kind of perceived threat or provocation.

But what is it that the trigger unleashes? What is the huge difference that comes from one of these triggers that makes the after so much different than the before? And what I would say is that the trigger unleashes popular forces, popular forces that come bursting onto the political scene like the Kool-Aid Man. Whether in the form of crowds or demonstrators or marchers or barricade builders, militias, or full blown organized armies, the political confrontations that have thus far been going on in the political society now have a large mass mobilization element that is uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the prevailing sovereign. That’s what the trigger triggers. That’s when an intractable political crisis becomes a full blown revolution: when the people get in on the action.

Now, no doubt, many of you out there listening have perhaps been surprised by the early centrality that I have placed on ruling class divisions as the vital precursor of revolutions rather than talking about popular upheavals, grassroots pressure, social movements, the kind of things that come from outside the narrow band of the ruling class. These popular forces come with agency and direction and purposes beyond anything the ruling class is interested in, so why not make them the center?

But my read on all these events that we’ve covered is the absent irreconcilable differences inside the ruling classes, those popular forces can’t make a revolution. They can only make a revolt or an insurrection or an uprising. A united ruling class is a very tough nut to crack. Unless that popular energy links with defecting elements from inside the ruling class who have the resources and authority and leverage necessary to actually make the thing happen, this revolt will most likely burn out or be suppressed. Only when the ruling class is divided and when a major faction is ready, willing and able, to ride popular waves rising up in the street, do we get a revolution.

Now, that said, there’s a crucial distinction then to be made the other way: if a breakaway group from inside the ruling class takes power without introducing any popular forces, it’s what? It’s probably just a coup d’etat. So, if popular uprisings without elite support are merely revolts and elite cliques trying to seize power without popular support is merely a coup, then I think that maybe we can sharpen our definition of a political revolution. I said that it was when “the existing structure of political power — how power is exercised, justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure, and is replaced by something different.”

I should now add the notion that the force originating beyond the bounds of the existing structure has to have some sort of broad, popular element and some kind of element inside the ruling class. There needs to be a cross -class alliance for it to count as a revolution.

Now, it’s also important to qualify everything I’ve just said by saying that it is not in fact the case that there were no popular forces at work in our various revolutions prior to the final trigger being pulled. It’s not the case that the trigger necessarily brings people out into the street for the first time. Let’s remember here that there was plenty of mob violence and destruction of property in Boston. Carried out pretty routinely in the 1760s and 1770s. Before the Fall of the Bastille, France saw routine grain riots for years, to say nothing of things like the Day of the Tiles and the re own riots. We often see marches and protests and even violent clashes taking place prior to the great revolutionary trigger. What makes the trigger a trigger is that it fuses the interest of that breakaway clique in the ruling class and a popular force now backing them up. They are now pushing in the same direction towards a very irregular solution to their collective political problems.

But the entrance of a popular element does complete the cross-class alliance, I think is so vital to a successful revolution. We now have an armed force populated with individuals ready to fight against the prevailing regime and taking orders not from any institution of the old regime, but from their own new chain of command, which terminates with some pocket of the old ruling class now setting itself up as the new ruling class. The trigger locks into place what is effectively a whole shadow society, featuring everyone from wealthy elites to middle class professionals and intellectuals to artisans and workers and soldiers and peasants. All of them are now linked by a new set of binding ties, often defined by all those new ideas that we talked about, which are now floating around out there. This shadow society is going to try to displace the old society.

Another thing we have to mention when we’re talking about all this stuff is that though a popular force is now present and the people have now entered the picture, that does not mean that the people are a single united entity; nor that popular forces represented anything close to a majority of the inhabitants of whatever kingdom, empire or republic were talking about. The People — capital T capital P — are an invocable political concept, not a description of the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the population. As you may have noticed, the popular forces unleashed by our various revolutionary triggers are often just a subset of the population of a single major city, like Boston or Paris or Petrograd. And even when the revolution spreads to include other regions and cities and villages, it’s not like the revolutionaries ever make up a true majority of the population. Not only are there plenty of people from rich elites on down to poor peasants who will be ready to uphold and defend the former regime, let’s face it: most people, most places, most of the time, are apolitical. They don’t care. They’re just trying to ride the thing out.

So, the kinetic revolutionary energy unleashed by the trigger, these popular forces, are never actually representative of the people everywhere united. That’s just never going to be a thing that happens. Nor is it even necessary. It’s just that so many of those people are in fact, willing to march out into the streets that the sovereign regime can no longer control events. That’s what we mean by popular forces entering the picture. They have become too big for the regime to control.

And that right there is the rub. That’s the point. That’s the crux of the thing. In the grand scheme of things, I think what’s really going on with these triggers, what they do, when they turn political confrontations in the ruling class into full blown revolutions, is that they open up the great challenge to the sovereign’s last bulwark of power: their preponderance of force. That preponderance of force is what kept everyone and everything in line. It’s what the sovereign has that practically makes it a sovereign, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Until the revolutionary trigger gets pulled, this preponderance of force is not questioned, however consciously or tacitly, up until that trigger point. It’s taken for granted that the sovereign can deploy coercive physical force far beyond that which can be deployed by any rival or challenger.

But when the trigger is pulled, it breaks the last tie binding those old political arrangements, and it brings popular forces out into the street and sets up a physical contest for power. This is a challenge to the sovereign’s claim to a preponderance of force in the most direct way possible. It’s like challenging the reigning champ to a fight: if you think you are so strong, prove it. And as we’ve seen, our existing ancien regimes, our sovereigns, they’re weak. And incompetent. And ineffective. And it is not at all clear they will be able to prove it.

So next week, we’re gonna move on to the first stage of the actual bonafide revolution. No more disequilibrium or shocks to the system or triggers, but now a raw contest for power pitting a weak ineffectual but still powerful leviathan against a revolutionary force enjoying maximum .revolutionary unity.

Now, if you’ve paid even a little bit of attention in the podcast, you know that that period of maximum revolutionary unity is very fleeting. And never ever outlast the death of leviathan.

But before we go, I just wanna remind everybody that I am coming to Boston, Washington, DC and Newark live and in person on October 26th, 27th and 29th. I just got back from my run through Austin and San Francisco and Seattle, it went great. The shows are super fun and I love being out there. So please get your tickets while you can, and if you’re in Boston, Washington, DC, or Newark, I will see you there.

And if not, I will see you here next week for Appendix Six.

 

 

This week’s episode is brought to you by Trade Coffee. Every day is a precious gift, and if you’re like me, every one of these precious days is gonna start with a cup of coffee. The question then becomes, is your precious day going to start with a bad cup of coffee, a mediocre cup of coffee, or maybe a good cup of coffee? Well, I can say that ever since I started with Trade Coffee, my days have always started with a good cup of coffee. But what I think of as a good cup of coffee isn’t necessarily what you think of as a good cup of coffee. We all have different palates. So with Trade Coffee, you get to take a questionnaire that expertly matches you to your best cup of coffee. They’ve got a team of experts curating 450 different types of coffee to pair you with, based on roast and flavor profile and brewing method and more. My latest batch just came from City of Saints Coffee with locations in Hoboken and Brooklyn. Specifically, I got their Citizen Blend — heavy caramel body offset by potent autumn spices, and a chocolatey finish… it’s really, really good.

So if you wanna support small businesses and brew the best cup of coffee you’ve ever made at home, it’s time to try Trade Coffee. Right now, Trade is offering our listeners a total of $30 off their first order, plus free shipping at drinktrade.com/revolutions. That again, drinktrade.com/revolutions for $30 off your subscription to the best coffees in the country.

This week’s episode is also brought to you by Harry’s. So I’m back on the road again. I wrapped up a three week tour just in time to go back out on another tour. My schedule has been very tight, which I think is true of all of us these days as we go straight from one thing to another. But the regularly scheduled arrival of razors from Harry just as I need them, makes them like the official sponsors of cutting it close.

I never go anywhere without my Harry’s kit. I love the shave I get from Harry’s, and especially at that price. Normally, a low price shave means something rough and irritating that makes me kind of wish I hadn’t shaved at all, but with Harry’s, I’m always walking away feeling good, clean and refreshed and perpetually happy I’m not paying outrageous premiums just to feel good, clean and refreshed.

Right now you can get Harry’s starter set for just $3, plus, you’ll get a free travel size body wash. This set includes a five blade razor, weighted handle, foaming shave gel, and a travel cover, a $16 value for just three bucks. Visit harrys.com/revolutions so no matter how busy things get, stay fresh with Harry. Get your Harry starter set today, and you’ll also get free travel size, body wash. Just go to harrys.com/revolutions — that again, harrys.com/revolutions.

And now a word from our sponsor, Better Help. We all go through life with problems. Living a nice, healthy life is not about solving problems until there are no more problems left to be solved, because that’s impossible. It’s about having strategies to resolve old problems so that we have bandwidth to deal with new problems that come along. Now a terrible strategy for resolving old problems is to just keep rehearsing them in our heads, keeping us so fixated on reminding ourselves what our problems are that we forget that the whole point of defining these problems is to find a way to resolve them, not like torture ourselves in morally fixated perpetuity. Now, one of the things that a good therapist can do is help knock us out of that rut, to shake us out of the habit of wasting so much time rehashing our problems, and instead using that valuable time to solve them. Because mostly we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The therapy we get gives us a broader perspective to see bigger pictures and work towards overcoming and solving and disentangling ourselves from our problems, rather than just sitting with them forever.

So when you wanna be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/revolutions today to get 10% off your first month. That’s betterhelp.com/revolutions.

~dramatic music swells~

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 4: Shocks to the System

By the time you’re hearing this, I will already be on the road for a run of shows in Austin on October 3rd, San Francisco on October 4th and Seattle on October 5th. But if you want, you can still grab a ticket to any of those shows, and I think you should do that, because it’ll be a great time. I’m also looking forward to Boston, October 26th, Washington DC, October 27th, and Newark on October 29th.

Links to tickets for all of those shows are in the notes to this episode. Now, unfortunately, since last we spoke, the Chicago date has been postponed due to scheduling issues out of my hands. If you bought tickets to it already, thank you, thank you very much. Uh, the venue will be reaching out about what happens next. It’s beyond my control and purview, so unfortunately I’m not gonna be in Chicago, but all other places I will see you very, very soon.

Now, over the past few episodes, we have established that revolutions emerge from societies with sovereign regimes that were once successful. And not successful in the distant past, but successful quite recently, and quite recently successful because their political institutions modified and transformed with the times. It’s tough for a political apparatus to go even a single century without significant modification. Even something as apparently timeless as the British monarchy has only lasted all these centuries thanks to major changes to the monarchy — like, for example, then not having any real power anymore.

Here in the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788, but there have been, at minimum, like a half dozen major transformations to the prevailing constitutional regime over the past 230 odd years. I mean, the constitution that was ratified wasn’t even the Constitution that was in effect like 20 years later, they were already amending the hell out of it, and it’s been continually shifting to fit the structure of American society ever since.

Now, as we’ve discussed, the stable equilibrium of successful regimes is always dynamic and full of conflict. Political rules, structures, expectations, evolve, grow, and shift constantly. No successful regime is successful because they are static. It’s always seeing organic replacement of members of its ruling class, and resultant changes in methods and objectives of statecraft as the political regime tends to be representative of and align with the prevailing productive forces. As those forces shift and transform, the state has to do the same, while always maintaining this little laundry list of things that needs to do: balance the interests inside the ruling class, maintain stable revenue streams to cover expenses, keep up credit worthiness in the eyes of the banking system, and always, always, always keep a preponderance of force over all other potential political challengers.

But the various regimes we’ve been dealing with, the regimes that become ancien regimes, stopped being able to navigate such social change for whatever reason. The balance between innovation and tradition falters. Disequilibrium enters the system. Larger conflicts open up among the rival conflicts of the ruling class. Ambitious elites outside the in-favor group grow larger and more confident and more active, as our ancien regimes generate either resistance to their innovations, or frustration with their lack of innovations. New ideas enter the picture: either wholly new concepts and ways of thinking, or new ways of framing old political conflicts in abstract and apocalyptic terms. And just to touch back on this, because Americans love telling a story about the glorious perpetual uniformity of our constitutional system stretching back to the days of the founders… I mean, there was a whole ass civil war in the middle of all this, and the entire constitutional structure had to be renegotiated on the battlefield because the former regime was unable to reconcile the differences of the American ruling class.

Now, today we’re gonna talk about the moment in the buildup to a revolution when a regime facing unstable disequilibrium is hit by a major shock to the system. This is not the trigger point that unleashes revolution, but a shock that moves all the pieces into a hardened, immovable place, such that a revolution doesn’t have to break out, but the odds have tipped so mightily in its favor that it kind of seems unavoidable. These big shocks to faltering systems reveal all the fault lines and ruptures and broken pieces which will lead through a few final acts of mismanagement, stupidity, luck, ambition, and desperation towards revolution.

And these shocks are not a quick thing that happened just before the trigger lights everything up. All the things we’re gonna talk about today precede that trigger point by like two or three years, a weirdly consistent number as I found as I went through all of this. Every revolution is different though, and so I believe it will be profitable to go through the specifics of each revolution we covered in the series to identify what the great shakes were that took disequilibrium to full blown revolutionary potential and then assess where we are at.

So the outbreak of the first English Civil War in 1642, what begins the English Revolution, was preceded three years earlier by the first of our system shocks: this is the Bishop’s War of 1639. This is when Charles attempted to create religious uniformity in his kingdoms by imposing the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on the Scots.

Charles, launching the Bishop’s War in 1639, is almost the platonic ideal of the Great Idiot move. Political disequilibrium had been rising during his years of personal rule, but if he just hadn’t gotten into anything that stretched the crown’s resources too thin or provoked too much passionate resistance, his personal rule could have gone on, like, indefinitely, But instead, he voluntarily plunged into a war that provoked hardened resistance on multiple fronts simultaneously: religion, politics, finances, ethnicity, nationality; all of these questions were opened up all at once. The Bishop’s War shocked the political system from disequilibrium into hardening polarization that also gave all of Charles’ enemies the point of leverage They needed to pursue their ambitions for power, and that was money. Charles needed money to prosecute the Bishop’s War, and he was gonna have to come to them for money. And to get that money he was gonna have to recall Parliament. And when they reconvened, they planned to make Parliament the arena of revolution. So 1642 is made possible by the system shock in 1639.

Now it’s a little harder with the American Revolution to pinpoint the exact shock that made conflicts over colonial administration following the Seven Years War truly unresolvable, the exact moment when colonial resistance to Crown and Parliament’s innovations became a true pre-revolutionary crisis. But if we don’t overthink it too much, one does tend to land on the showdown over the Tea Act of 1773, the resultant Boston Tea Party and Intolerable Acts. In response to these final shocks, rhetoric on both sides escalated in truly mutually exclusive directions. On one side of the Atlantic, there was the need to defend the principle of parliamentary supremacy, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the need to defend the sacred rights of Englishmen. And though it’s often not talked about quite as much as the closing of Boston and other onerous trade restrictions, uh, the Quebec Act is actually one of the major shocks, because it threatened Virginia planters like George Washington, who were speculating in Ohio land as much as the other parts of the Intolerable Acts affected the hooligans of Boston. So all those correspondence committees,pan-colonial coalition builders and active organization of the militias to defend the colonists from threats not just from below or from beyond but from above began to be taken very seriously, which set up the powder alarms of 1774 and 1775. But the final system shock to the American colonial regime came in May of 1773 with the Tea Act. It was, after all, extremely downhill from.

Now if the American Revolution is a bit nebulous about the precise moment of the system shock, the French Revolution can be drilled down to a very specific date. That date is August the eighth, 1786. This is the day Controller-General Calonne went to King Louis XVI and said, sir, we’re stony broke. We simply don’t have the money to pay our bills anymore. Opposition elements inside the French ruling class, particularly the rising Robe Nobility, had been resisting political, economic, and administrative reforms for a good fifteen years. But as awareness of the Crown’s financial distress circulated, they braced for what was sure to be the strongest push for those kinds of reforms yet, at a time when they had the best chance of resisting that push, because they wielded both the material resources and political rhetoric necessary to force a constitutional settlement on the Crown. And the response to the financial crisis — the desperation of the Crown, the ambition of the Robe Nobles and their incompatible rhetorical claims — drove France in to a political crisis that opened in the summer of 1786, just as a social crisis was breaking out that would snowball into 1789. But I don’t think that hail storms and bad harvests trigger the French Revolution absent the stunning shock that hit the system on August the eighth, 1780.

Now the Haitian Revolution was intimately tied to events in France, so much so that when we go looking for the pre-revolutionary shock, that would shatter the web of tension in Saint-Domingue, the answer is just… the French Revolution, As we saw repeatedly during the series on Haiti, events in Saint-Domingue were determined by the arrival of the latest news from France. The big whites of Saint-Domingue followed events in France closely, and when those events moved towards the Day of the Tiles in 1788, the subsequent call for the Estates-General, questions about what sort of representation the population of the colony should have broke out everywhere. The Big Whites started talking independence, talk that scared the hell outta the free people of color in the colony, as they knew full well that the Big Whites looked enviously at the young United States, which was a closed republic of landed white oligarchs defending slavery and answering only to themselves.

This created the conditions of an outright civil war between the Big Whites and the free people of color in the colony, as the free people of color could not and would not allow a Declaration of Independence in the name of racial apartheid to go through. These irreconcilable conflicts triggered by the French Revolution in 1789 — that’s the big shock here — made possible the real revolution that was set in motion in 1791, the slave insurrection. So you can almost say here that August the eighth, 1786 is doing double duty, because absent the French Revolution, there is no Haitian Revolution. At least, not the one we saw in our historical timeline.

Now, Spanish American Independence is very messy to explain because there’s multiple phases to those conflicts stretching out over like 25 years. But there was one big shock to the Spanish colonial empire in America, which as with Haiti, actually happened back in Europe. This is Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1807, which knocked off the Bourbon Monarchy and created absolute havoc in all Spanish jurisdictions. Up until that point, all the revolutionary hopes of people like Francisco de Miranda and young Simón Bolívar were proving hopelessly quixotic. The forces of prevailing order were simply too strong. But the catastrophic impact of the Napoleonic conquest in the Peninsular War so completely reshuffled the political alignments in the Americas that those dual axes of power we talked about, liberals against conservatives and centralists against federalists, saw each of those four factions come out about as strong as all the others. Now, events in Spanish America do not move in quick linear fashion towards revolutionary victory, but the shock of Napoleon opening up his bleeding ulcer in Spain in 1807 created the conditions against which potential revolutionary triggers could actually trigger a revolution. And one need only look at the spectacular failure of Miranda’s expedition as late as 1806 to see how important the Napoleonic invasion of 1807 was to the possibility of revolutionary action in Spanish America.

Now, when I went looking for the shock to the system of the French Revolution of 1830, I looked and I looked, and I was just striking out. Couldn’t find a war, not an economic crisis, not even really a financial crisis. There didn’t seem to be anything that looked like a great shock to the system the way that these things played out in other revolutions.

Until it dawned on me that the shock to the system came on September the 16th, 1824, and this is when Louis XVIII died and the Comte d’Artois ascended to the throne as King Charles X. The revolution of 1830 was so completely and thoroughly about Charles himself that his elevation to power was in and of itself the final shock to the Restoration Bourbons, a final shock that they didn’t survive. Now, the north star of his elder brother, Louie XVIII, had almost literally been maintained political equilibrium at all costs. It’s why Louis XVIII died with a crown on his head, and his brother did not. After Charles X came to power, France advanced rapidly towards disequilibrium and then revolution just simply by the very presence and behavior of Charles X. After he arrived, the incompatible and apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides of the political divide exploded in mutually exclusive directions by the late 1820s. Charles believed he was tasked with restoring a traditional order ordained by God; the liberals believed they had to defend the rights they had won through hard years of war and revolution and refused to give back. I’d venture to say that 1830 was likely the most avoidable of all the revolutions we’ve covered. Having even a slightly less combatively provocative monarch on the throne, the Kingdom of France sails through the summer of 1830 with nary a barricade in sight.

Now, one might argue that 1848 was just as avoidable, and indeed Francois Guizot’s reaction to the Banquet Campaign was an act of almost incomprehensible self-sabotage. But unlike 1830, Europe in 1848 had been laboring for a few years under a system shock caused by what we would often consider to be the traditional causes of modern revolution: economic and social upheavals tearing their inadequate political regimes asunder. I mean, the hungry forties were a thing. Crop failures and the potato famine led to a humanitarian crisis, which put pressure on the consumer economy, which triggered a business recession, which triggered worker layoffs and then, finally, that great split atom of revolutionary chaos, a financial crisis for the state, as tests to the credit-worthiness of the conservative regimes of Europe forced them to make concessions to those whose money they needed to survive. So the shock to the system that made 1848 possible arrived around 1846, with widespread crop failures and the cascading effects thereof.

Now, our series on the Paris Commune was really two revolutions in quick succession. The first was the overthrow of the Second Empire and the Declaration of the Third Republic, the other was the Revolt of Paris and the Declaration of the Commune. The political disequilibrium of the Second Empire had metastasized after Napoleon III’s run of success in the 1850s gave way to his run of failures in the 1860s. And even absent the Franco-Prussian War, the liberal opposition to Napoleon III was riding so high by the late 1860s that it’s kind of hard to not see France ending up with institutions that look an awful lot like the Third Republic one way or the other, whether there was a titular figurehead monarch or not. But history goes the way history goes, and the Franco-Prussian War did happen, and even though this particular shock did not proceed its revolution by years like all the other examples, the Franco-Prussian War is when the political dynamic changed so thoroughly that revolution became possible, and then probable, and then, an accomplished fact. So the Franco Prussian war is the shock to the system.

But the other revolution nested inside the overthrow of the Second Empire is the Paris Commune, and its intractable political conflict with leaders of the newly proclaimed Third Republic. This was rooted in the Siege of Paris; that was the shock. The experience of the Parisians during the siege, their isolation and estrangement from the rest of France, coupled with the not wholly unjustified belief that the rest of France was happily and purposefully sacrificing them to the Germans… it radicalized them, polarized relations between them and the leaders of the Third Republic, such that when the siege was lifted, there was very little common ground for anyone to stand on. There was very little common ground anyone wanted to stand on.

Now, of all our Great Idiots of History, I gotta say, I think Porfirio Díaz was the best of the worst. He was the least dumb idiot of them all. He was extremely gifted at creating and maintaining stable political equilibrium in Mexico. And in 19th century Mexico, that’s no mean feat. But by the time the 20th century rolled around, old Porfirio had lost his nimble edge after running into a question he would not answer, possibly because he could not answer: the question of who would succeed him in power. It was the succession question more than anything else that unraveled the Porfiriato, because with the political and economic and geographic factions of the Mexican ruling class balanced so delicately, the minute Díaz named a successor that represented one of those factions, all the others were going to be very angry. To say nothing of the possibility of naming a successor more popular than he was, which might result in his immediate overthrow — that’s why he stayed away from Bernardo Reyes. So Díaz stalled. He tilted this way, while leaning that way, and in the end got so focused on avoiding naming a successor who was too popular that he named Ramón Corral, who everyone hated, which turned out to be even worse. Then, as economic and social upheavals rocked Mexico in circumstances very similar to 1848, Diaz himself dropped the final shock into the system: this is the Creelman Interview of 1908, where he said, “I won’t seek reelection in 1910.” This interview created a zero sum game contest for the presidency of 1910, pitting every Mexican faction against every other Mexican faction that none could afford to lose. And then Díaz changed his mind and ran for reelection in 1910, but by then, too many people were too committed to succeeding him to allow him to not be succeeded.

Now finally with the Russia series, we talked actually about two great revolutions: 1905 and 1917. And the shock to the system in both cases was disaster in foreign war. 1905 was caused by the massive unforced error that is the Russo-Japanese war, which very nicely brings us full circle: a full revolution, back to Charles I and the Bishop’s War. In both cases, we got a military conflict launched by the sovereign thanks to a mix of hubris, stupidity, and myopia that rebounds so spectacularly in their faces that it absolutely shatters the legitimate foundations of their respective regimes. Now, World War I wasn’t quite so specifically Nikki’s fault — though it is fun to remember that he got into World War I, partly because he believed it would undercut revolutionary threats that had been escalating prior to the war.

(Good job there, didn’t work.)

But in both 1905 and 1917, the shock of defeats, the mismanagement and the ineptitude, created huge anti-regime coalitions ranging from conservative nobles to bomb-throwing anarchists, all of whom were so frustrated by the government’s stupidity the disequilibrium actually passed into a new political equilibrium that coalesced outside the infinitesimally small inner circle of the tsar’s nuclear family. Like, there was a new kind of equilibrium that had emerged from World War I — it just excluded Nicholas. So very clearly in both 1905 and 1917, the expectation of quick military victory giving way to prolonged humiliations and defeat are what shocked an already unstable autocratic system into revolutionary upheaval.

Now, an observation we can make here after reviewing all of this is that almost no two revolutions faced identical shocks to their respective systems. There is very clearly not one weird trick for shocking an already shaky system into revolution.

Now, war is a pretty good culprit in all of this, we do see this repeatedly:in Stuart England and Romanov Russia, both proactively started wars that undid them. The Spanish American Empire also got shocked by a war, but they were invaded, conquered, and occupied by an outside force, that’s a very different thing. Now the Franco-Prussian war was more similar to Stuart England and Romanov Russia, and was absolutely the thing that loaded the Second Empire into its deathbed. So for those four revolutions, I think war really is kind of the answer.

But war is not always the answer. The French Revolution, the greatest revolution of them all, was not shocked by a war. There was no war to be had. It was all about a state financial crisis that was so bad the French couldn’t even do wars anymore. The American Revolution was meanwhile just about intolerable administrative reforms, it also had nothing to do with the war. The Haitian Revolution was triggered by the collapse of its home government, not unlike Spanish America, but in this case, it was not caused by invasion and occupation, just good old homegrown chaos. The Revolution of 1830 came down almost entirely to the conduct of the individual monarch, had nothing to do with anything but Charles. 1848 saw widespread economic and social distress that outstripped the ability of the European regimes to cope. And then finally, Porfirian Mexico followed 1848-style social problems with financial panics and recessions, but was mainly about a regime unable to answer the question of succession, which is the one time we really saw something like a succession crisis trigger a revolution in the whole series. Which surprises me because the history of Rome was so full of revolts and insurrections and revolutions surrounding succession time.

But whether the shock was military or economic or political, when it came, the effect was the same, and that’s the point. Competing factions in the ruling class polarized away from mere disequilibrium into something far more combative. Because in all the cases, from the Bishop’s war to World War I, the regime was exposed as weak, ineffectual, and incompetent, that’s what the shock does. There was now blood in the water and ambitious elites see a golden opportunity to grow their power and authority at the expense of the weak and ineffectual and incompetent sovereign. The shock to the system means that it now looks like a very good time to strike, the time to risk it all, rise up and attack, instead of meekly backing down in the face of the forces of traditional order. Because more than anything else, it was no longer clear that the sovereign held that all important preponderance of force. And critically, as we talked about last week, the breakaway faction of the ruling class looking to capitalize on the regime’s apparent weakness was now armed with new ideas and theories and phrases that elevated their struggle from mere self-interest up into the lofty realms of liberty and rights and justice.

They staked their lives in fortunes and sacred honor to the idea that they fought for more than just a refusal to pay new taxes. And when those kind of lofty motives, that lofty rhetoric, meet the opportunity created by a shock to the system and the awareness that the regime is now weak and ineffectual and incompetent, well, backing down becomes as unthinkable as standing up had once been.

Next week, the people are going to start standing up. And things are about to start getting out of hand. Appendix 5 is trigger time — when all the kindling has been laid, fuel has been piled up, and the sparks are flying all over the place. And there have been plenty of times in history where even at this late hour, even when an unstable regime has been hit by heavy shock to the system, revolution still does not break out because the final triggers don’t hit just right. But we’re not here to talk about any of those.

Because, what’s the fun in that?