Counterrevolution? What Revolution? Author(S): Eugen Weber Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol
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Revolution? Counterrevolution? What Revolution? Author(s): Eugen Weber Source: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Apr., 1974), pp. 3-47 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/260045 Accessed: 31-08-2015 15:38 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Contemporary History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:38:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Revolution? Counterrevolution? What revolution? Eugen Weber Almost any discussion of fascism is bound to involve consideration, explicit or not, of its revolutionary or counterrevolutionary nature. Fascists claimed to engage in a revolution. Their opponents denounced them as counter- revolutionaries. Most students divide unevenly about this: many consider the fascists' counterrevolutionary role self-evident, a few prefer to begin by taking the fascists at their word, some still judge the charges unproven. At any rate, the debate suggests the high symbolic, hence passional and practical, value of terms like revolution and counterrevolution, increasingly loaded, in intellectual and political intercourse, with an ethical burden that even the mass media perceive. The revolutions of the 18th century stood over the cradle of the modern world; the modern world remembers. It is a long stretch from the fall of the Bastille to the launching of a revolutionary new detergent, but it is worth the trip. As Sellers and Yeatman would have said, revolution is a good thing. One never hears of a counterrevolution in automobile design, though one might be in order. Better accentuate the positive. As a result, the struggle for political advantage involves minor but important skirmishes for semantic advantage. Like the hero in a Western movie, the movement that comes in riding on revolution can, as a rule, expect our sympathy. I shall suggest that, as of today at least, the issue is wrongly joined. Like 'Left' and 'Right', Revolution and Counterrevolution have become anachronistic stereotypes, real because installed in vocabulary and minds, but confusing as categories for understanding and scholarly analysis. 3 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:38:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CONTEMPORARY HISTORY Misleading, above all, because for a long time now the notion of revolution has been interpreted in one sense only, implying automatically that movements directed to other ends (opposite, or simply different) could not be described as revolutionary, and might well be counterrevolutionary, whether they wanted to be or not. The very word, revolution, suggests the great modern prototypes: French and Russian. These more than suggest, they impose, a model of what revolution should be because it once was, of expectable actions and stages to which revolutionary developments should conform: the last throes of the dominant classes, the first phase of a bourgeois revolution overtaken by more popular challengers, duly put down in a Thermidor easily leading to Brumaire. Moderate change, radical advance, repression, and their dialectic, always open to further challenges. Interpretation provides the recipes of expectation. Sometimes of action too. History is born of history. From Marx's reference to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, to Trotsky's description of the Soviet Thermidor when Stalin takes power, through Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution, patterns are formulated and roles are prescribed where coming players (or reporters) learn their parts. A French academic historian, writing about the student revolt of 1968, refers to barricades, red flags, 'the Faculty buildings resembling the Smolny Palace (sic) in Petrograd, the lecture halls [resembling] Soviets'.1 And Andre Malraux, writing in 1972, resumes the 20th century in one image: that of a truck bristling with guns. Obviously, the Russian revolution again, and one of the most familiar images of it. Some responsibility for this lies in organized history and the generalization of historical knowledge, making available that pattern of revolution to which revolutionaries will henceforth conform. Those that fail to conform are not revolutionaries. 'The revolutionary knows his revolution as the wretched knows his want,' writes Andre Decoufle, author Max Gallo, Gauchisme, rkformisme et revolution (1968) 133. Despite all this, he explains, May 1968 was not the revolution. (Unless otherwise indicated, all books quoted are published in Paris.) 4 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:38:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions REVOLUTION? COUNTERREVOLUTION? WHAT REVOLUTION? of a recent work generally regarded as one of the more sensible treatments of a touchy subject.2 But the wretched knows his want, precisely because he lives in it, the revolutionary seldom does more than imagine his revolution. And those revolutionaries who, today, in the perspective of history, still claim to know their revolution - in its unfolding beyond means to ends - must be naive indeed. But history, storehouse of images and recipes that it is, does not exhaust the revolutionary's resources. Gracchus Babeuf could tell his readers, and later his judges, that the Republic was worthless: 'But it is not the real Republic. The real Republic is something we have not yet tried.'3 The point, frequently made since Babeuf, proceeds from hypothesis to fact, and even against fact. Thus in Decoufle: 'The hypothesis of the revolutionary project excludes the destruction of man, since it is [aimed at] his regeneration; and, in fact, it does not destroy him, despite the horrible enterprises of some of its managers. Beyond all the propagandas, the present chronicle of the Soviet Union bears abundant witness to this.'4 I like Decoufle's reference to the managers of revolution, a handy and expressive term and a revealing one. But it is odd to find, in a book published in 1968, the reaffirmation of an ideal which remains entire though some of its managers betray it, the deliberate denial of historical experience by affirmation of its contrary, and all on the basis of an original hypothesis stronger than any observed fact. The Revolution survives all revolutions. Far from fearing facts, the hypothesis consumes them, that is it assimilates them to its needs. Boris Porchnev turns the peasant rebellions of the 17th century into evidence of class struggles in the early modern period. Decoufle hails Eric Hobsbawm's Primitive Rebels as a work on revolutionary phenomena, despite its French title: Les primitifs de la 2Sociologie des revolutions (1968). There is no point in taking intellectual issue with the lunatic fringe. Decoufle is used for reference because he represents the more respectable French students of the subject. 3Quoted in John Anthony Scott, The Defense of Gracchus Babeuf (Amherst, 1967) 42. 4op. cit., 40 5 This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Mon, 31 Aug 2015 15:38:49 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions CONTEMPORARY HISTORY revolte. Even social rebellion of a primitive kind must be mobilized for revolution.5 Such topical imperialism, perfectly dispensable in marxist terms, conceals the difference between revolution and rebellion (a difference Hobsbawm himself in no wise ignores!) and deprives the critic of a category he could find useful in refining his terms. Decoufle does distinguish between insurrection, which finds its end in itself, and revolution which is transhistorical, 'situated in the realm of duration, temporal site of immanence;' and this permits the keen observer to distinguish between an insurrection, however long-drawn-out, and a revolution, however brief. Thus, the 'revolution' of 1830 was actually an insurrection that lasted 18 years, while the Paris Commune of 1871, though only a few weeks long, can be identified as an authentic revolution, just like .. .the Crusades !6 It is Decoufle's modest claim that such a conception helps to avoid a lot of shopworn debates and endows 'the category of revolutions with an unusual extension and strictness [of definition]'. To the uninitiated, the extensibility of the category and its flexibility appear more striking than its strictness of definition. Events are promoted, excluded, or denied. The Crusades, of course, are there in honor of Alphonse Dupront who (re)invented them. Unless it is to fill the gap left when strict construction eliminated the Agricultural and the Industrial revolutions. But what about the revolution of 1830, demoted to a mere insurrection, yet very much a revolution to its contemporaries: change of regime, of the symbols of state, of the flag, of political personnel... isn't all that enough, until next time? 5 ibid. 7, also 11-12. One might ask in passing whether popular interest in or sympathy for social bandits and some of the other outlaws described by Professor Hobsbawm, who often prey more on their own kind than on the powerful and the rich, reflects even the most primitive form of social revolt. The solidarity of common folk against lawmen and tax collectors is rooted in human and local experience, not in social awareness, however dim. Take the case of smugglers, whom peasants took for granted, buying the salt or matches they sold, accepting their activities as part of the local economy, aiding them when they could. Though differently motivated, such attitudes no more reflect social revolt than our occasional sympathy for those who cheat the Customs or Internal Revenue.