Revolution and the Global Struggle for Modernity: Volume 1 - The Atlantic Revolutions

By Frank Jacob

This book, as the first volume of a multiple volume endeavor to analyze several revolutions of the “long” nineteenth and “short” twentieth century to show how revolutionary processes evolved, takes a closer look at the Atlantic Revolutions, that is, the American, the French, and the Haitian Revolution. It will therefore use a comparative ten-step model to emphasize similarities with regard to the revolutionary developments in different parts of the world. The book consequently aims at providing a general, but deeper, understanding of revolutions as a global phenomenon of modernity while explaining how revolutionary processes evolve and develop, and how they could and can be corrupted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781785278426

Frank Jacob

Frank Jacob ist Assistant Professor für Weltgeschichte an der City University of New York (QCC). Nach dem Studium der Geschichte und Japanologie an der Julius-Maximilians-Universit.t Würzburg wurde er 2012 im Fachbereich Japanologie der Universit.t Erlangen promoviert. Neben zahlreichen anderen Publikationen ist er Herausgeber der Zeitschrift Global Humanities.

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Revolution and the Global Struggle for Modernity

Revolution and the Global Struggle for Modernity

Volume 1

The Atlantic Revolutions

Frank Jacob

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2024

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© Frank Jacob 2024

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no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

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(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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2023948248

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-840-2 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-840-1 (Hbk)

Cover Credit: Attack and take of the Crête-à-Pierrot (4 - 24 March 24, 1802).

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This title is also available as an e-book.

Published in Open Access thanks to the financial support received from Nord Universitet.

For all revolutionaries of the past, present, and future.

May their hopes and dreams eventually be the base for a better world.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Chapter One Introduction: Revolution as a Struggle for and Phenomenon of Global Modernity

Chapter Two The Analytical and Comparative Ten-Step Model

Step 1: Violation of rights

Step 2: Disagreement

Step 3: Protest

Step 4: Reaction

Step 5: Point of no return

Step 6: Struggle

Step 7: Change

Step 8: Internal power struggle

Step 9: Violence

Step 10: Establishment of a new regime

Chapter Three The American Revolution

Introduction

The Dialectic Chain of Violation and Protest

The Point of No Return and the Path to War and Independence

Chapter Four The French Revolution

Introduction

From Violation of Rights to Protest Formation

From Louis XVI’s Reaction until the Revolutionary Change

The Violent Spiral and the End of the Revolution

Chapter Five The Haitian Revolution

Introduction

Rage against the Colonial Society: From Violation of Rights to the Point of No Return

Struggle and Change, 1791–1794

Internal Power Struggles and Toussaint Louverture’s Rise to Power

Chapter Six Conclusion

Works Cited

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the result of a long process of reading, thinking, and writing about revolutions. It would not have been possible to finish it without the tremendous support I received from colleagues and friends over the years. I would like to thank Nord Universitet for their generous financial support to publish the book in Open Access and thereby making the ideas about revolutions expressed here more broadly accessible. Furthermore, I am indebted to my colleagues at the university for their helpful remarks during the last years and their willingness to debate revolutions and questions related to this historical phenomenon during lunch breaks and scientific seminars.

Similarly important were my talks and discussions about revolutions with students, who always offered critical insights and new angles I had not considered thoroughly enough before. I hope that future generations of students will continue to do that, as it really enriches my own work. I also very much appreciate the comments of the anonymous peer reviewers who commented not only on the initial proposal but also on the finished manuscript. Their service in this regard is very much appreciated, and their remarks further enlightened my understanding of revolutions and helped me to improve the manuscript considerably. I am also particularly grateful for the help I received from Anthony Wright, who did an excellent job with the language editing of the text. Special thanks are also due to the team at Anthem Press, who supported me during the writing process and were patient with me, even though sometimes deadlines were stretched quite a bit.

Last but not least, I would like to thank my wife and daughter. Without their support and love, none of this work would ever have seen the light of day.

Chapter One

INTRODUCTION: REVOLUTION AS A STRUGGLE FOR AND PHENOMENON OF GLOBAL MODERNITY

Revolutions are an essential factor within human history, yet they have been considered differently through time. Friedrich Engels states that the only true historical right people possess is the right of revolution.¹ For his intellectual companion and friend Karl Marx, the revolution was a locomotive² that stimulated an acceleration of the historical process and time as such, while Walter Benjamin considered the revolution to be an emergency break within the course of history.³ Such a positive view is not a surprise, since communism was based on the idea that the Hegelian dialectic would eventually end with a proletarian revolution, leading to a classless and better society. Yet conservatives, like the politician and lawyer Friedrich Julius Stahl, who served at the University of Berlin and gave a lecture about revolutions in 1852, had a different view on revolutionary events that had determined the political doctrine, which since 1789 […] complied with the way of thinking of the people.⁴ Revolutions were directed against God, and for Stahl, they only expressed the human wish to satisfy their selfish needs.⁵ As a consequence of revolutionary processes, the will of the people should be more important than the order established by God, which is why conservatives like Stahl refused the positive image of the revolution because it was the revolution that everted the existent order and makes the human the origin and center of the moral world order.⁶

Revolutions usually caused debates about the changes they stimulated, and various historical examples clearly evince that the fights between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, as well as the conflicts between different revolutionary factions, often between more moderate and more radical ones, presented the violent potential that often accompanied revolutionary transformation processes. In contrast to such politically and religiously motivated views, Hannah Arendt highlighted that the aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom.⁷ However, it is clear that revolutions change existent power structures, as, to quote Charles Tilly, they include forcible transfers of power over states.⁸ Revolutions tend to seek the establishment of something entirely new.⁹ In a way, therefore, they intend to create a form of discontinuum with the existent past.¹⁰

Since many studies on revolution talk about the historical phenomenon without clearly specifying what they consider a revolution to be,¹¹ I would first like to define what a revolution is before proposing a new analytical model for the comparative study of such phenomena.¹²

A revolution is, first and foremost, the change of a political system that could only have been achieved by force (whether the threat or actual use of force) because the old elites were not willing to transform the political system according to the wishes of the political contesters.¹³ When reforms had failed or were blocked by the old elites, revolutions began to evolve. Second, revolutions are processes that contain multiple interest groups and usually begin less radically than they end. Moderate demands usually radicalize during the revolutionary process, turning into demands that eventually are not limited to the political level but also address the wish for social change. Third, revolutions are mass movements that can lead to violent power struggles in the aftermath of the achievements of political change when the newly achieved political order is contested by former revolutionary or counterrevolutionary forces that do not accept the achieved change and therefore demand a second revolution within the process.¹⁴ Fourth, revolutions are always and exclusively modern,¹⁵ although some scholars have discussed premodern or even ancient revolutions.¹⁶ In fact, these rebellions of the premodern period are not to be considered revolutions as the rebels did not intend to change the whole political and social system but rather their own position or status within it. Therefore, regardless of later perceptions and interpretations, Spartacus, to name just one famous example, was not revolutionary at all.¹⁷ To put it very trivially, he did not want to abolish slavery as such; he just did not want to be a slave himself.

Revolutions must consequently be understood as a phenomenon of global modernity. In modern times, revolutionary waves¹⁸ often caused tremendous change, which is why revolutions have been considered important for modernity and its formation as such, e.g., the birth of the modern concept of history in Hegel’s philosophy¹⁹ by Arendt, or as driving forces of a steady modernization process, e.g., the already mentioned locomotives of history of Marx. Enzo Traverso remarked in this regard that [r]evolutions are history breathing in and out,²⁰ as they represent the contraction and relaxation of radical change within the historical development of modernity. Ernst Engelberg, not without reason, considered revolutions to be the knots and turning points²¹ within the historical process that mark possible starting points for alternative streams of time within the course of history. However, revolutions often form some kind of saddle period (Sattelzeit) in themselves, bringing together the past, the present, and the future in the same moment.²²

In fact, revolutions often create a caesura, if not from a global perspective, then at least from a national one.²³ The French Revolution, to name probably the most famous example, which will be discussed in detail later, became, as Matthias Middell highlights, the point of departure for global ideologies like liberalism and conservatism, as well as providing an agenda for communism and socialism.²⁴ It was definitely a global event and would later create what Martin Malia called a cult of revolution.²⁵ The revolution in France truly changed the world, and it was considered the mother of all future revolutions, the matrix for Marx’s concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’.²⁶ Later, just as the nineteenth century lived under the hypnotic spell of the French Revolution, so the twentieth century was hypnotized by Lenin’s October.²⁷

Great revolutions are often at first a political phenomenon, although they can demand or provoke socioeconomic and cultural changes as well.²⁸ Reinhart Koselleck claimed revolution to be a socio-political as well as a scientific term.²⁹ The political and social levels of a revolutionary process are, however, according to Koselleck, hard to separate from each other.³⁰ The term is complex in itself, as revolution refers to unique but repeatable events simultaneously and contains diachronic and synchronic aspects.³¹ Elements and structures of a revolutionary process can, according to Koselleck, be repeated, but each revolution in itself is unique. There are consequently some generic elements concerning revolutionary processes, which, however, evolve according to their respective national or local context quite differently. Such a careful understanding of the phenomenon is vital, as it is essential when studying revolutions and revolutionary processes to reflect upon and understand them within their specific historical and local contexts.

That they are considered significant events needs practically no emphasis, but it is important to understand the impact of revolutions, e.g., the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution in the nineteenth century and the Chinese Revolution and the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century. Eric Hobsbawm emphasized the impact of the Russian Revolution when he argued that it "was the first proletarian revolution, the first regime in history to set about the construction of the socialist order, the proof both of the profundity of the contradictions of capitalism, which produced wars and slumps, and of the possibility—the certainty—that socialist revolution would succeed."³² It stimulated hopes and dreams around the world, as its degradation was not a given, was not written in any stars,³³ only to bitterly disappoint them once the corruption of the revolution became visible.³⁴ Nevertheless, for many people and for some years, it marked the beginning of the new world.³⁵ To measure the impact of its hypnotic spell across the world is easy; to use Hobsbawm’s words again, [e]ach communist party was the child of the marriage of two ill-assorted partners, a national left and the October revolution. This marriage was based both on love and convenience.³⁶

Taking into account what has been said about revolutions so far, it is also important to mention that a revolution as a process can vary with regard to its time span and, of course, success. They are hard to predict, although much can be learned by comparing revolutions in different political and social contexts.³⁷ All revolutions appear to be or are at least perceived as being fast, but some are faster than others because they happen in different settings.³⁸ Some are even peaceful at the beginning, yet most revolutions hold the potential to become violent. If they fully evolve toward a radical revolutionary change, violence is inevitable as such changes usually lead to confrontations with counterrevolutionary forces and violent internal power struggles among different revolutionary factions as well.

Regardless of Eurocentric approaches that claim that revolutions are an exclusively Western phenomenon,³⁹ revolutions must be considered global in the fullest sense of the word since they can appear in every region of the world and develop genuinely without a dominant Western influence as well, although ideas related to previous revolutions might have a strong influence on a certain revolutionary intelligentsia. Due to this globality of revolutionary processes, it is natural to compare them,⁴⁰ be it with a focus on social,⁴¹ political, or institutional structures.⁴² In particular, Theda Skocpol’s approach was fundamental since it stimulated a new discussion about comparative models for revolutions. While she falsely argues that new social revolutions have enabled decolonizing and neocolonial countries such as Vietnam and Cuba to break the chains of extreme dependency⁴³ and thereby limits the social perspective to the so-called Third World, she correctly highlights that these cases deserve special attention,⁴⁴ especially when compared with European revolutions. Social revolutions, according to Skocpol, are rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures, while [p]olitical revolutions transform state structures but not social structures, and they are not necessarily accomplished through class conflict.⁴⁵ It is strange that Skocpol consequently distinguishes between European political and non-European social revolutions and therefore devalues her demand to analyze the latter from a structural perspective, with special attention devoted to international contexts and to developments at home and abroad that affect the breakdown of the state organizations of old regimes and the buildup of new, revolutionary state organizations.⁴⁶

As mentioned before, such a distinction between political and social revolutions is not particularly helpful, especially not for a comparative analysis. Revolutions are never exclusively either political or social, and, very often, social and political wishes collide within revolutionary processes, above all when the social demands do not match the political realities.⁴⁷ While Skocpol’s main argument, namely that comparative historical analysis is the most appropriate way to develop explanations of revolutions that are at once historically grounded and generalizable beyond unique cases,⁴⁸ is correct, she lacks a good analytical model for her comparison of the revolutions in France, Russia, and China.

Another group of scholars, referred to here as the Leipzig School of Comparative Revolutionary Studies, led by Walter Markov and Manfred Kossok, not only placed 1789 in the broader context of revolutions in Europe and the Americas⁴⁹ but tried to develop instruments for the comparative historical study of revolutions.⁵⁰ The two scholars argued that a comparative revolutionary history would resemble the dialectic entanglement of universal and national history in a specific way. By comparing single case studies, the general main features, i.e., the repeatability of a historical process,⁵¹ can be identified. Once these general main features have been identified, they offer better insights into and understandings of the national cases. Therefore, comparative revolutionary history was supposed to mean neither shoreless relativization, nor a process of de-nationalization of a historical concept.⁵² While attempts for the periodization of history have been made before, especially in East German works that followed a basic Marxist–Leninist orientation,⁵³ Markov and Kossok tried to provide a typology of so-called bourgeois revolutions—in a way, the necessary theoretical precursors of a proletarian world revolution—by naming three different examples:

1. Revolutions that are directed against a feudal order to establish a bourgeois and capitalist society

2. Revolutions in a capitalist time by which the bourgeois state and social order are further strengthened

3. Bourgeois-democratic revolutions that, due to the failure of the bourgeoisie, are led against it and its interests

⁵⁴

Such bourgeois revolutions would, however, have their own specific cycle, as became apparent during the French Revolution. A process by stages⁵⁵ was considered to characterize a revolutionary cycle. Yet the Leipzig School did not intensify this approach to provide a model for such a process that could then be used for further comparative studies. This book offers such a comparative analytical model and therefore strongly relies on the ideas of Markov and Kossok, who, with their numerous works, were heading in the right direction. Without a clear comparative model, it is hard to study multiple revolutions, a task that further highlights the universal history of revolutions, especially in a time where most cases of revolutionary history have been subjected to withering factual, conceptual and terminological scrutiny.⁵⁶ Regardless of their vital groundwork, the Leipzig School, particularly Kossok, failed to consider colonial revolutions similarly to their European analogs, i.e., as global phenomena; instead, they talked about peripheral revolutions that marked the decolonization processes of the twentieth century.⁵⁷ When we compare revolutions with an analytical model, we have to do so without evaluating the revolution according to geographical, cultural, or political norms. First and foremost, a revolution must be studied according to the analytical model presented in this book, i.e., without any pre-considerations that would divide revolutions into categories. The revolution’s generic elements should be identified, and if differences can be highlighted within different revolutionary processes, one has to ask why such differences exist.

Consequently, a global comparative perspective can help us to better understand local perspectives on national revolutions and vice versa, the transcultural impact of ideas related to revolutionary experiences, and the exchange of revolutionary knowledge through the migration of people as a result of revolutions. Such a global comparative perspective can thereby overcome a certain historical fragmentation.⁵⁸ Furthermore, only such an approach can provide a neutral result of the comparison. One has to accept that revolutions differ according to their own space–time continuum, although they follow some basic or generic stages or steps of revolutionary development since they are not only national events but also genuine phenomena of human history and modernity as such. That is why an analytical model is necessary to study such generic phenomena in comparison. It will also help to learn more about revolutions through similarities and differences that appear within the process.

It is clear, therefore, that revolutions develop according to some basic rules, yet these do not proceed as if following a script. Timothy Wickham-Crowley stresses with regard to structural theories for revolutions that the current obsession with metatheory and endless postmodernist philosophizing can get individuals tenure, promotion, and fame, but gets the study of society nowhere.⁵⁹ This is especially true of the idea of revolutionary scripts that are followed by revolutionaries who know about the revolutions of the past. Malia even argues that each revolution learns from the experience of its predecessor, and so escalates […] each time to a more intense level of radicalism.⁶⁰ This is, of course, as nonsensical as to argue along the hypothesis that civil war was the original genus of which revolution was only a late-evolving species.⁶¹ In fact, Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein tried to explain the similarities shown by revolutionary processes with the existence of a revolutionary script, claiming that [r]evolutionaries are extremely self-conscious of (and often highly knowledgeable about) how previous revolutions unfolded, and therefore use revolutionary scripts [as] frameworks for political action.⁶² At the same time, they relativize their daring thesis (steile These) by emphasizing that, although a script exists, it can also be changed, adapted, or even subverted by the introduction of new events, characters, or actions.⁶³

Revolutions are not planned performances made possible […] within or upon the revolutionary script,⁶⁴ especially since those who consider themselves revolutionaries often miss the start. The beginning of a revolution can be very surprising, perhaps even lacking an indication that one has actually started, and many who support change might not consider themselves revolutionary at all. The argument that [w]hen a crisis occurs, a sufficient number of individuals may decide that the time is right to enact a revolutionary script is also misleading; many people might not even be aware of any revolution-related knowledge and are therefore not conscious revolutionaries. Those who compare their current acts with revolutionary ones of the past are often professional revolutionaries who have studied revolutions for a long time. The masses of the people that are needed to start a revolutionary process are often far from considering themselves revolutionary. The initial demands of the masses are, in addition, often characterized by immediate necessities rather than a revolutionary agenda. Without the support of the masses, a revolutionary movement cannot exist, and it is doubtful that such a critical mass of people would join protests due to knowledge about the past instead of the perception of an actual necessity. They may start a mass protest, but at this point, it is not yet decided if this mass protest will lead to a fully developed revolution. For the masses, there exists no script. And for those who intend to follow such a revolutionary script, the journey might be over before it begins if they cannot motivate the masses to move toward change. There must be a serious reason for ordinary women and men to become revolutionarily active, usually war, an economic crisis, severe suppression, or all three at once. Only those who have nothing to lose will join the revolutionary movement in large numbers, yet they might still be unaware of the revolutionary nature of their acts. They do not care about their past but about the future. Consequently, they usually express often very simple demands. They are not demanding the revolutionary utopia that a handful of intellectuals might be dreaming of. This is one of the reasons why leading revolutionaries radicalize their position during a revolutionary process: the lack of mass support in the aftermath of a successful change stimulates the direction of a course and the abandonment of initial plans. Of course, the existence of similarities within revolutionary processes does not mean that [similar events] were fated to [happen].⁶⁵ However, according to the analytical approach, there is quite a significant chance of such similarities, namely every time the preconditions for the revolutionary process are similar.

With regard to the idea of a script, it must also be stressed, with a special focus on the French Revolution, that knowledge about past events did not automatically cause performative repetition. Michael Zeuske highlights this with regard to the impact of the developments in France between 1789 and 1799 in the Caribbean world: For the elites in Spanish America, Europe was a distant world. For them the real revolution was the Saint-Domingue Revolution of 1791-1803, a revolution of former black slaves and free people of colour in the most densely populated slave region of their world—the Greater Caribbean.⁶⁶ What mattered in the region were the consequences of the local events: The most important result of the slave revolution in the Caribbean was thus an extremely strong counter-revolution which took the form of economic modernity and reformism.⁶⁷ It also needs to be strongly emphasized that there was not a single French Revolution in the French colonies of the Caribbean, but a specific revolution in each colony.⁶⁸ However, this was not the only case where knowledge about the revolutionary events in France did not cause the kicking in of a script, especially since revolutions frequently develop entirely differently from their original ideas, demands, and level of radicalism.⁶⁹

In Russia, as Alexander Tchoudinov remarks for the nineteenth century, [t]he admiration for the French Revolution among Russian radical intellectuals had something of the character of a religious cult,⁷⁰ and many of these young members of the Russian intelligentsia were quite familiar with the historical events in France. The Russian anarchist Vladimir Debogory-Mokrievich describes the euphoria related to the revolution of 1789 as follows:

As for the history of the French Revolution, they [the young intellectuals, F.J.] translated and distributed primarily the works of its apologists. We were deeply read in them. We knew the names of all the actors of the French Revolution, from the main leaders to second-ranking figures and even some of no significance. Some liked Danton, others preferred Camille Desmoulins, one dreamed of Saint-Just. Such was the environment in which we lived in the 1870s, which enflamed us with revolutionary fire.⁷¹

Yet the Russian revolutionaries did not want to replicate the events of the French Revolution, rather […] they dreamed of some vague and beautiful triumph of Liberty that reflected their mythologized ideal, an ideal that passed from generation to generation of the Russian intelligentsia.⁷² Of course, young Russian revolutionaries looked to the French Revolution for inspiration, yet the revolution took place on Russian soil and not in France. Furthermore, the Russian intellectuals could not form a revolution alone, and the workers and peasants, the critical revolutionary mass, did not have the same enthusiasm in its breadth, let alone the knowledge about the revolutionary events in France between 1789 and 1799. While commemorations of and references to the revolutionary events in 1789 might have attracted the support of a majority of intellectuals for the overthrow of the monarchy in February 1917,⁷³ it cannot be claimed that it was more than a very loosely defined illusion that brought many revolutionaries together at that time. In his work Baptism by Dirt (1918), the Russian novelist Fyodor Sologub remarks on the failure to compare France and Russia by many of his contemporaries:

We have been too hasty to call our revolution ‘great’ and to compare it which the great French revolution. But now we see that our epoch has few men of greatness, and that our revolution is a mockery of the great French revolution.[…] France, in revolt against despotism, brought Europe a baptism by fire and blood. And the heinous demon that has possessed us is heehawing and baptizing by dirt.⁷⁴

It might be true that the Bolsheviks, in particular, were stressing referential images to the French Revolution in their propaganda activities, but these were addressed at other leftist intellectuals, not at the masses, who were probably as unfamiliar with the historical events as they were with Lenin’s more complex ideas.⁷⁵ A script that only existed in the heads of the intellectuals is consequently rather irrelevant as long as they are incapable of controlling a revolutionary process as such alone and can only do so if and as long as they can motivate the masses to act on behalf of the revolutionary hope or promise. Moreover, this must be related to the actual demands of the people and, therefore, must not only represent utopian ideas.

When people around the globe considered the Russian Revolution of 1917 to be the key revolution of the 20th century,⁷⁶ they believed it would fulfill the principles formulated between 1789 and 1799, but these were utopian dreams.⁷⁷ Very quickly, it became clear that never before […] had an idea and a movement, which was determined to achieve the liberation of mankind, failed as tragically and equally so despicably unheroically⁷⁸ as the Russian Revolution. The French Revolution was used to legitimize the rule of the Bolsheviks, who, as modern Jacobins, had to use force to save the revolutionary ideals. Regardless of these attempts, the Bolshevik leadership had to install its own historians, like Nikolay Lukin, who was the first to confirm this new narrative or interpretation of the French events.⁷⁹ Similar reinterpretations of the past can be observed in China, where a revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century determined the history of the region and of the world as a whole.

Mao Zedong accepted that revolutions are violent: A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.⁸⁰ Mao therefore accepted the revolutionary reality even before the Chinese Civil War reached its most intense period between 1945 and 1949. The violence used by the French revolutionaries was, for him, at the same time popular, terrible, and efficient.⁸¹ Due to the strong counterrevolution, the non-bourgeois masses were needed to secure the revolution against the conservative enemy after 1789, and Mao realized that the peasants, China’s masses, were the key to the success of a revolution in the Chinese revolutionary context. He therefore accepted the reality of the local context, but many other Chinese revolutionaries were fascinated by the history of the French Revolution and were convinced that a revolution in China should follow the same path.⁸² At the same time, Mao could draw inspiration from the events in Russia since 1917⁸³ when he was preparing for the civil war against the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. While this internal power struggle would, as Gao Yi remarked, eventually become the greatest historical drama on China’s political stage in the twentieth century,⁸⁴ it also highlights that revolutions follow a specific dynamic that usually does not consider the initial aims of those who started the revolutionary process, or, to put it rather more trivially, no revolution remains a nice revolution.⁸⁵

Hannah Arendt emphasized very early on that even the knowledge about, not a script for, the dangers related to a revolutionary process does not secure it against its potential failure:

The trouble has always been the same: those who went into the school of revolution learned and knew beforehand the course a revolution must take. It was the course of events, not the men of the Revolution, which they imitated. Had they taken the men of the Revolution as their models, they would have protested their innocence to their last breath.[…] What the men of the Russian Revolution had learned from the French Revolution—and this learning constituted almost their entire preparation—was history and not action. They had acquired the skill to play whatever part the great drama of history was going to assign them, and if no other role was available but that of the villain, they were more than willing to accept their part rather than remain outside the play.⁸⁶

There is another simple reason why revolutionaries would not usually follow a script from the past; as Hobsbawm correctly highlighted, [r]evolutions and ‘progressive movements’ which break with the past, by definition, have their own relevant past,⁸⁷ but they are much more concerned about the future to which the revolution should lead.

Considering its initial achievements, Bini Adamczak’s evaluation of the Russian Revolution as the first permanently successful socialist revolution⁸⁸ is correct, but what she calls a post-revolutionary depression⁸⁹ when the ruling Bolsheviks violated the revolutionary ideals of the first hour was inevitable. All in all, it should be emphasized that revolutions never follow any plan or script by a small group of intellectuals because they are historical phenomena in which the masses are present and essential.⁹⁰ Without mass mobilization, a revolution as such cannot exist,⁹¹ and it is the role of the masses that either destroys the radical intellectuals’ utopian dreams, like in the elections of January 1919 in Germany, or forces the revolutionaries to use violence to protect their position of power. That the masses are not always open for an advance or true revolutionary change is not a surprise since they are rarely genuinely radical. Usually, the masses demand simple things and can be attracted by immediate acts that change their living conditions, not by utopian or intellectual dreams. The French psychologist Gustave Le Bon previously explained this incapacity of mass movements as follows:

Civilisations as yet have only been created and directed by a small intellectual aristocracy, never by crowds. Crowds are only powerful for destruction. Their rule is always tantamount to a barbarian phase. A civilisation involves fixed rules, discipline, a passing from the instinctive to the rational state, forethought for the future, an elevated degree of culture—all of them conditions that crowds, left to themselves, have invariably shown themselves incapable of realising. In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies. When the structure of a civilisation is rotten, it is always the masses that bring about its downfall.⁹²

It is therefore the target of everyone who wants to control the revolutionary process to control the masses, either by promises that the people have to trust in or, as is more often the case, by brute force.

It has been shown so far that the idea of a revolutionary script is not helpful in explaining and understanding revolutionary processes. Of course, knowledge about older revolutions exists, yet this is already based on individual interpretations and rarely provides a plan that is followed in detail, especially since revolutions are mass-driven and mass-dependent processes that evolve according to their own dynamics. I would, therefore, following somewhat in the footsteps of the Leipzig School, argue for a more sophisticated theoretical and comparative analytical model for a genuinely comparative study of revolutions. It is not a new insight that historically and comparatively grounded studies are the best way to explore and exploit the gains of theory, just as theory must be used to illuminate the particularities of individual cases.⁹³ However, a suitable model has not yet been provided, although the great revolutions of the past themselves can serve as analytical models.⁹⁴ These models, however, as Hobsbawm argues, were derived from the arbitrary selection of revolutions which happened to form part of the analysts’ intellectual universe,⁹⁵ and many definitions are considered unrealistic and tend to assume the existence of a universal class of revolutions (or a single ideal type of revolution).⁹⁶ Very often, clear definitions of the revolution that such a model should compare were not provided either:

Hitherto revolutions has come to be used quite unambiguously only for certain total historical phenomena which combine three features. First, a process which is both violent and in the nature of a sudden shock—a breaking through or overturning, especially as regards changes in the institutions of state and law. Second, a social content, which appears in the movement of groups and masses, and generally also in actions of open resistance by these. Finally, the intellectual form of programmatic idea or ideology, which sets up positive objectives aiming at renovation, further development or the progress of humanity.⁹⁷

One comparative model that used to be very influential was Crane Brinton’s model, as formulated in his Anatomy of Revolution (1938).⁹⁸ Brinton, whose model goes back to the Reverend Lyford P. Edwards’ The Natural History of Revolution (1927),⁹⁹ compares—very Eurocentrically—the English, American, French, and Russian Revolutions and argues that these revolutions follow a specific order. Brinton’s definition of a revolution is simplistic: A drastic, sudden substitution of one group in charge of a territorial political entity by another group hitherto not running that government.¹⁰⁰ This is as simplistic as his analytical model, which consists of four phases:

Old Regime

Revolution

1. Moderate phase

2. Radical phase

3. Phase of terror

4. Thermidor

Cooling Off Period

This analytical model must be considered a first step for every historical comparison of revolutions, yet it should be further refined. Whenever an analytical model is used, one has to keep in mind that revolutions, while in process, very often do not leave much space for free decisions¹⁰¹; rather, the dynamics within the revolutionary process define the course. However, this course shows similarities in many case studies, almost like there is a basic revolutionary pattern.¹⁰² It is, of course, not argued here that all revolutions are identical according to their historical development, but it is argued that a better analytical model is needed to compare revolutions to provide a better understanding of revolution as a phenomenon of global modernity. Chapter Two, therefore, presents an analytical model according to which revolutions must be compared. Subsequently, this volume will apply this model to three cases from the revolutionary wave in the Atlantic World between 1776 and 1804: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution.

1Friedrich Engels, Einleitung zu Karl Marx, Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850 (1895), in Marx-Engels Werke (henceforth MEW), vol. 22, 524, cited in Manfred Kossok, 1917—eine periphere Revolution?, in idem, Sozialismus an der Peripherie: Späte Schriften, ed. Jörn Schütrumpf (Berlin: Dietz, 2016), 80. On Engels’s experiences of and views about revolutions, see Frank Jacob, Friedrich Engels and Revolution Theory: The Legacy of a Revolutionary Life, in Engels @ 200: Reading Friedrich Engels in the 21st Century, ed. Frank Jacob (Marburg: Büchner, 2020), 49–90.

2Karl Marx, Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850 (1850), in MEW, vol. 7 (Berlin: Dietz, 1960), 85.

3Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 153.

4Friedrich Julius Stahl, Was ist die Revolution? Ein Vortrag, auf Veranstaltung des Evangelischen Vereins für kirchliche Zwecke am 8. März 1852 gehalten, in idem, Siebzehn parlamentarische Reden und drei Vorträge (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1862), 132–146, accessed April 15, 2023, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/pdf/deu/4_P_O_Stahl_Was%20ist%20die%20Revolution.pdf, 2.

5Ibid.

6Ibid., 5.

7Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990 [1963]), 11.

8Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 5.

9Florian Grosser, Theorien der Revolution: Zur Einführung, 2nd ed. (Hamburg: Junius, 2018), 14–15; Hannah Arendt, Die Freiheit, frei zu sein (Munich: DTV, 2018), 38.

10 For a detailed discussion of the revolutionary discontinuum, see Gunnar Hindrichs, Philosophie der Revolution (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017).

11 Enzo Traverso recently emphasized this issue when he stated that [w]ith regard to revolution, too often critical understanding has been replaced by naïve enthusiasm, moral judgement or ideological stigmatization. Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (London/New York: Verso, 2021), xv.

12 For a survey of important studies about the topic until the year 2000, see Jack A. Goldstone, Toward a Fourth Generation of Revolutionary Theory, Annual Review of Political Science 4, no. 1 (2001): 139–187.

13 A broader theoretical introduction is provided in Frank Jacob, #Revolution: Wer, warum, wann und wie viele? (Marburg: Büchner, 2022).

14 Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

15 Karl Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff: Entstehung und Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). See also Arendt, On Revolution, 11.

16 Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 41–60. Goldstone’s book is popular but very often misleading and probably not the best introduction to revolutions.

17 Oleksii Rudenko, The Making of a Soviet Hero: The Case of Spartacus, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47 (2020): 333–356.

18 David Motadel, Global Revolution, in Revolutionary World: Global Upheaval in the Modern Age, ed. David Motadel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 1–37.

19 Arendt, On Revolution, 51.

20 Traverso, Revolution, 16.

21 Ernst Engelberg, Zu methodologischen Prinzipien der Periodisierung, Zeitschrift für Geschichstwissenschaft 19, no. 10 (1971): 1232.

22 Reinhart Koselleck, Über die Theoriebedürftigkeit der Geschichtswissenschaft, in Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft und Praxis des Geschichtsunterrichts, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 14–15. For a critical look at the concept, see Daniel Fulda, Sattelzeit: Karriere und Problematik eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Zentralbegriffs, in Sattelzeit: Historiographiegeschichtliche Revisionen, eds. Elisabeth Décultot and Daniel Fulda (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2016), 1–16.

23 Kossok and Markov, Zur Methodologie, 9.

24 Matthias Middell, The French Revolution in the Global World of the Eighteenth Century, in The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, eds. Alan Forrest and Matthias Middell (London/New York: Routledge, 2016), 25.

25 Martin Malia, History’s Locomotives: Revolutions and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2006), 6.

26 Ibid., 179.

27 Ibid., 254.

28 Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 240; Malia, History’s Locomotives, 279.

29 Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten, 240.

30 Ibid., 241.

31 Ibid., 245.

32 Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), 3.

33 China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2017), 307.

34 For an example concerning the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, see Frank Jacob, Der Anarchismus und die Russische Revolution: Emma Goldman und Alexander Berkman im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus, Ne znam: Zeitschrift für Anarchismusforschung 7 (2018): 3–66; Frank Jacob, Emma Goldman and the Russian Revolution: From Admiration to Frustration (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020); Frank Jacob, Emma Goldman: Identitäten einer Anarchistin (Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2022). On the moral corruption of the Russian Revolution, see Frank Jacob, 1917: Die korrumpierte Revolution (Marburg: Büchner, 2020).

35 Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries, 3.

36 Ibid.

37 On the question of predictability, see Nikki R. Keddie,