Fire in the Minds of Men : Origins of the Revolutionary Faith / James H

]ames H. Billington Origins of tbe Revolutionar~ Faitb witb a new intro~uction b~ tbe autbor El Routledge ~ ~ Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK Originally published in 1980 by Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. Published 1999 by Transaction Publishers Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 1999 by Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 98-24144 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Billington, James H. Fire in the minds of men : origins of the revolutionary faith / James H. Billington, with a new introduction by the author. p. cm. Originally published: New York : Basic Books, 1980. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. 1. Revolutions—History—19th century. 2. Revolutionaries— History—19th century. I. Title. HM283.854 1998 98-24144 303.6'4'09034—dc21 CIP ISBN-13: 978-0-7658-0471-6 (pbk) CONTENTS Introduction to the Transaction Edition vii Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 3 BOOK I FOUNDATIONS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY FAITH: THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES I Incarnation I7 The Idea of Revolution I The Fact of Revolution 2 A Locus of Legitimacy 24 The Cafes of the Palais-Royal I Nicholas Bonneville and Oracular journalism I The Fields of Festival 3 The Objec;ts of Belief 54 Liberty: The Republican Ideal I Fraternity: The Rise of Nationalism I Equality: The Vision of Community 4 The Occult Origins of Organization 86 Buonarroti: The First Apostle I The Pythagorean Passion 1 The Philadelphian Fantasy BOOK II THE DOMINANCE OF THE NATIONAL REVOLUTIONARIES: THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY 5 The Conspiratorial Constitutionalists ( I8I5-25) I28 The Forest Fraternity I International Echoes 1 Russian Reprise I Mediterranean Diaspora 6 National vs. Social Revolution (I 83o-48) The Dominant Nationalists I The Rival Social Revolutionaries 7 The Evolutionary Alternative Lafayette and the Lost Liberals I Fazy and the Swiss Success I Societies without Revolutionaries vi Contents 8 Prophecy: The Emergence of an Intelligentsia 208 The Saint-Simonians I The Hegelians I The Clash of "Isms" in I 848 9 The Early Church (the I 84os) 243 Credo: Communism I Ecclesia: A New Party I o Schism: Marx vs. Proudhon The Clash of Men I Enduring Issues II The Magic Medium: Journalism 306 The French Awakening I Ideological Journalism in Germany and Russia I2 The Waning of Revolutionary Nationalism The Last Heroes I Mass Journalism 1 Napoleon III and "Imperialism" I The Paris Commune I Marx vs. Bakunin I The Lost Romance BOOK III THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARIES: THE LATE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES I3 The Machine: German Social Democracy 367 Lassallean Origins I Kautskian Orthodoxy I The Struggle with Revisionism I4 The Bomb: Russian Violence 386 The Slogans of the Sixties I The Banners of the Seventies I The Lasting Legacy IS Revolutionary Syndicalism 419 The "General Strike" I The Fascist Mutation I The Western Frontier I6 The Path to Power: Lenin 443 The German Legacy I Russian Roots I The Master Builder I The Symbiosis of Extremes I7 The Role of Women The French I The Russians I The Germans I Rosa Luxemburg Epilogue: Beyond Europe 505 NOTES 511 INDEX 653 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION REISSUING in the late 1990s a book written in the late 1970s, it may be useful to summarize and take a fresh look in light of intervening developments at its main theses and underlying assumptions. The book suggests that the violent revolutions that convulsed the twentieth century grew out of a faith generated in the nineteenth. Politicized intellectuals created all-encompassing, secular ideologies as surrogates for religious belief within the European world during the century-and-a-quarter between the French and the Russian revolutions. Those who generated this faith and called themselves revolutionaries during this period were generally involved in journalism and rarely exercised real power. They believed that the violent overthrow of traditional political and religious authority would produce an altogether new order that would not just assure prosperity and justice but would also transform the human condition. There was a basic schism within the revolutionary faith between those who believed most in fraternity (that the nation was the vehicle of deliverance) and those who believed in equality (that a social class was the vehicle of deliverance). Both of these forms of faith differed fundamentally from the more limited, practi- cal, and anti-authoritarian belief in liberty that animated the American War of In- dependence. Although the American Revolution acquired symbolic significance for both national and social revolutionaries, its essentially liberal ideal exercised relatively little substantive influence on the modem revolutionary tradition as it radiated out from Europe to the world. The revolutionary faith carne out of the wilderness and into power in its most violent and messianic form in the wake of World War I. This bloody conflict delegitimized traditional authority and helped the national revolutionary tradition come to power in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany; the social revolutionary faith, in Lenin's and Stalin's Russia. These revolutions created dictatorships and modem totalitarianism. The most violent and authoritarian movements in Germany and Russia each intensified one form of the revolutionary faith by adopting significant elements of the other. Na- zism was, literally, an abbreviation for national socialism. Communism was de- fined as "socialism in one country." One fortified fraternity with equality; the other, Vlll Introduction to the Transaction Edition equality with fraternity. Each exemplified the distinctive characteristic of the revolutionary faith that "the extremes touch each other." Each subordinated liberty to a new and far more totalistic form of authority than had existed previously. The revolutionary faith was sustained in power at great cost to human life and freedom. I anticipated in my original introduction that there would be hostility to: ( 1) the suggestion that belief in revolution was a new kind of religion; (2) the emphasis on ideas and leaders rather than on social, psychological, and other material forces; and (3) the inclusion of exotic figures and symbols that distract focus from the customary hagiographic core of this subject. The desire to preserve a romantic and positive picture of the revolutionary tradition has remained strong in the academy even as that view has generally been repudiated by voters in the last generation. I believe that history in these last two decades provides some measure of vindi- cation for my suggestion then that the end might be approaching for this political religion-which might in the long run "prove to be only a stage in the continuing metamorphosis of older forms of faith." The two most important "revolutionary" upheavals of the last twenty years have been the Muslim extremist uprising that came to power in Iran and the Catholic-based solidarity movement that started the chain of events that overthrew Leninist rule in Eastern Europe. Both were precipi- tated by movements from below rooted in religion rather than by new movements from above rooted in secular ideology. I ended my original work by calling attention to the innovative nature of a still often overlooked earlier event in Poland: the overthrow ofWladislaw Gomulka in 1970. It was the first forcible change of political power brought about by a worker- led uprising in Eastern European since the Russian revolution of 1917. The Soli- darity movement that subsequently arose among the same workers posed the kind of challenge to which Leninist control structures proved altogether unable to re- spond. In 1987, when the prospect for significantly changing any Communist re- gime still looked bleak, I wrote about Solidarity that it represented "the awesome intrusion into ordinary life of the voice that proclaims both a higher moral stan- dard and a new set of historical possibility." I suggested that "it is not hard to imagine ... that in the 21st century ... even in the Soviet Union, historians will look back on Solidarity as an anticipation, if not a prototype, of movements ... developed to transform their own society in ways radically different from the violent secular revolutionary movements of the past."' Not simply in Catholic Poland, but in Protestant East Germany and ultimately Orthodox Russia, the pattern that emerged was non-violent, social rather than political, and tinged with religion. These changes were produced more by "spontaneity" than by the elite "conscious- ness" that Lenin had prescribed for his revolutionary party, by a desire for evolu- tion rather than revolution, liberty rather than fraternity or equality. Revolutionary ideology has been thoroughly discredited in the old Soviet em- pire, where it was most fully put into practice. It has yet to burn itself out altogether on the periphery

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