The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

  None of this really takes us very close to the core issue: why has there been no true revolution in British history? It goes without saying that Britain never approached anything like the socio-economic convulsions of the Russian, Chinese or Cuban Revolutions. The nearest the nation came to something like the upheavals in the French and Mexican varieties was in the aftermath of the English Civil War, but Cromwell slammed the brakes on hard and turned abruptly right. So opposed were his acolytes like Generals Monk and Lambert to real social change that they acquiesced in the Restoration in 1660. With a few further tweaks in 1688–9 the British constitution and the system for which it stands have remained unchanged in their essentials, with the main concession to pressure from below being the grudging and protracted granting of universal franchise, not finally achieved until 1928. How can we account for this? The only realistic comparison is with other European countries. The sceptic says that other nation-states have been revolution-free, but these turn out to be societies either of recent creation (Norway, Ireland, Finland) or those blessed with a small population and with an adamantine commitment to consensus, co-optation and local democracy (Switzerland, Sweden, Holland). The true comparison, therefore, must be with those nations which in the past 400 years have challenged Britain for European and global hegemony: Spain, France, Germany, Russia. All four societies have undergone almost endless turbulence. France was racked by wars and rebellions even before the French Revolution of 1789.11 There were further revolutions in 1830, 1848 and 1871, and a state of near civil war during the 1930s, when the Popular Front was under pressure from the extreme Right, and in 1958–62 on the issue of Algeria. Russia was similarly afflicted, largely as a result of the supreme autocracy of the tsars, and there is no need to labour the incidence of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917. Germany suffered the Spartacist rising in 1919, the abortive Munich putsch in 1923 and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, which by any standards was a revolution, and can only be dismissed as such if we take the simplistic notion that revolutions can only ever move in a leftward direction and involve the working class as primary agent.12 Italy, too, albeit a nation-state united only since the 1860s, sustained a right-wing revolution in 1922 when Mussolini came to power. Although Francesco Nitti, the Italian Prime Minister, told Austen Chamberlain in 1925 that Italy was the least revolutionary country in the world, such a view is treated with contempt by scholars, who point to a history before unification positively studded with riots, tumults, coups, rebellions, insurrections and peasants’ revolts. One leading authority goes further and alleges that Italy had a propensity towards counter-revolution, as evinced by Cavour’s reactionary machinations to neutralise Garibaldi. The only reason the events of 1922 came as a surprise to leading Italian thinkers like Benedetto Croce was that conservative factions and their tame historians had lied about the unpalatable reactionary truth about the Risorgimento.13 One is almost tempted to accept Jack Goldstone’s thesis about overpopulation (see above) since all European countries with a significant population, Britain excepted, have been visited by the spectre of revolution.

  The phenomenon of European revolution translates into another, also noted below (see here) whereby revolutions, revolutionary situations and revolutionary potential engender dictatorship or the phenomenon of Caesarism. The Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci explicitly linked Caesarism to revolution, for he saw the ‘man on horseback’ as the inevitable ‘solution’ for societies faced with the problem of an equilibrium of forces heading towards catastrophe.14 France has certainly had its share of Caesars. Even if we exclude Louis XIV and Louis XV, who were absolute rulers as absolute as one could conceive, complete with lettres de cachet with which to punish anyone who displeased them for whatever reason, from the time of the Revolution in 1789 there has been a long succession of French ‘strong men’: Napoleon, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III), General Boulanger, Clemenceau, Poincaré, Pétain, de Gaulle.15 Germany had Frederick the Great, Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler. Spain had a long tradition of caudillos culminating in General Franco, spent much of the nineteenth century in civil war (the Carlist wars), lurched into chaos in the twentieth century, suffered three years of civil war and then thirty-six years of fascist dictatorship.16 Russia’s record for autocracy is even worse, with Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the Romanovs well to the fore, and ending with Stalin, Yeltsin and Putin. Echoing the psychologist C. G. Jung, who saw Hitler as an introjection of Wotan and the ancient German forest gods, some Russian specialists speculate that two centuries under the yoke of the Mongols – Batu, Berke, the Golden Horde, the Blue Horde, Toktamish, Tamerlane – has left a permanent scar, that Russia has aborbed despotism and autocracy into its collective unconscious.17 Britain, by contrast, has experienced just one dictator since the despotism of the Tudors – Cromwell, memorably described by Trotsky (a grudging admirer) as a fusion of Luther and Robespierre.18 Cromwell turned down the offer of a crown, thought his son Richard incapable of carrying on his work, and all but confessed that in the British context dictatorship was a dead end. Just as sociologists try to find a master-key explanation for revolution, so they attempt to explain Caesarism. Various studies have appeared, claiming organic linkages between dictators, but unable to agree on the causal lines; with one author Napoleon leads logically to Hitler (doubtless partly because both were foolish enough to invade Russia and made abortive attempts to invade Britain); with others the line leads from Napoleon to Stalin or, even more ingeniously, from Rousseau through Napoleon to Stalin.19 The only common factor sociological studies of Caesarism identify convincingly (apart from Gramsci’s very broad-brush analysis) is that most dictators come to power at a relatively young age and tend to hail from the provinces or marginal areas, never from the capital or metropolis. Hence Napoleon (from Corsica, coming to power at 30); Hitler (from Austria, coming to power at 44); Mussolini (Emilia Romagna, 39); Franco (Galicia, 44); Cromwell (Huntingdon, 46) and Mao Tse-tung (from Hunan province but slightly letting the side down by taking until the age of 56 to ascend to supreme power).20 Other than fitting into this ‘young outsider’ schema, Cromwell has little in common with the others and is but one more example of ‘English exceptionalism’.

  In trying to analyse why Britain has escaped serious revolution (defined as those of ranks two and three), there are basically four approaches that can be adopted. One can try to find an overarching theory explaining all revolutions; for the reasons mentioned in the Introduction this seems a forlorn hope.21 One can try to find an explanation for all attempted revolutions in Britain (England before 1603). Or one can admit that this too is an implausible objective and aim instead for convincing causality for a single ‘near miss’. Or one can abandon hope entirely and concede that the causes of even a single revolution remain beyond our grasp. It must be admitted that the last, defeatist scenario is the one most in line with current thinking. Gradually all the ‘grand theories’ purporting to explain the seismic events of the past have been abandoned. Until the end of the 1950s it was still commonplace to describe the English and French Revolutions in Marxist terms as part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The objections to this thesis multiplied to the point where the attempt was eventually abandoned.22 Similarly, the American Civil War was often seen as the irreconcilable conflict between primary and secondary production systems, between an industrial North requiring protectionism and an agrarian South needing free trade. Even slavery is no longer considered a key issue, with most recent writers opting for the idea of the State cracking under the competing demands, political and economic, of two powerful political cultures.23 The origins of the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the American Civil War, to name just three of history’s ‘great events’ are increasingly sought in the misperceptions, miscalculations and mistakes of individual actors, in unintended consequences, in contingency of the most aleatory kind, even in what would be called the demotic ‘cock-up theory’. Many historians have retreated into the study of acciden
t and circumstance of the most adventitious kind. Roughly speaking, one can say that mainstream liberal and conservative historians believe in contingency and discontinuity, while those of a leftist or sociological orientation still maintain a structural approach implying continuity and commonality of historical phenomena. The latter believe that there are patterns in history, the former that history never repeats itself. Two good examples of the latter view may be given. Here is Crane Brinton on why general studies of revolution are needed: ‘We shall have to be content with the crude assertion that the doctrine of the absolute uniqueness of events in history seems a nonsense. History is essentially an account of the behaviour of men, and if the behaviour of Man is not subject to any kind of systematisation, this world is even more cockeyed than the seers would have it. History at least gives us case studies, is at least material for the clinician.’24 And here is Trotsky on why the Chartist movement denoted an essential continuity in the British revolutionary tradition:

  The Chartist epoch is immortal by reason of the fact that for the space of ten years it gave us in a compressed and diagrammatic form apparently the whole gamut of proletarian struggle – from petitions in Parliament to armed insurrection … one may say that the Chartist movement is like a prelude which gives us in an undeveloped form the musical theme of the whole opera … Chartism was unsuccessful not because its methods were incorrect, but because it came too early. It was only an historical overture.25

  Devotees of historical uniqueness or adventitious contingency, on the other hand, look for support from the physical sciences. They argue that since each human being is radically different, it follows that their collision and interpenetration in history will never produce the same or even similar results. As for the radical difference, the noted physicist Carl Sagan pointed out that the number of permutations in the human brain, based on the count of neurones or synapses connecting them, is greater than the whole number of elementary particles (electrons and protons) in the entire universe.26 A word of caution is in order. David Hume long ago pointed out that virtually everything we hold to be ‘knowledge’ can be devastated by the method of philosophical scepticism, but that the sane philosopher will retire with a good book and a good bottle after he has completed his lucubrations. Insistence on the absolute uniqueness of everything and the denial of the validity of universals is a project that cannot really be carried out in good faith, especially in historical study. Radical empiricism, nominalism and its analogues would prevent us not just from using the word ‘revolution’ but absolutely basic concepts such as ‘war’, ‘rebellion’, ‘society’, ‘system’, etc.

  It seems clear that there are certain basics about Britain which, while not in themselves guarantees of a revolution-free existence, are at least pointers to the factors likely to be involved. Most fundamental is the fact that Britain is an island, and Shakespeare’s famous paean to ‘this England’ underlines the importance of the ‘sea girt’ element in national culture. Britain (and especially England) has never been successfully invaded since 1066, though serious attempts were made in 1588 by Spain, in 1692, 1759, 1779 and 1803–5 (by France) and in 1940 (by Germany).27 The main reason is that the Royal Navy was in a successful alliance with the elements themselves. Historians notoriously dislike determinism, which is why they systematically underrate weather as a factor in human history. Characteristic accounts of the Spanish Armada, for example, wildly overrate the personality of Elizabeth I, her ‘sea dogs’ and the inconclusive Battle of Gravelines and play down the storms that ravaged the Spanish fleet on its perilous journey home, into the Atlantic off the west coast of Ireland.28 One of the principal reasons these islands have not been successfully invaded since 1066 is that they are surrounded by dangerous, gale-lashed seas, and only recently has it been realised just how terrifying oceanic elements can be. Tales of 100-foot waves were usually dismissed as the tall stories of old salts who had spent too many years before the mast, but modern science has demonstrated that such seas are an ever-present danger and that no ship yet built is designed to withstand them. It is a moral certainty that so-called freak waves were responsible for some of the most famous maritime losses of the twentieth century, including those of the ships Waratah, Derbyshire and München.29 ‘Near misses’ in the past few years after encounters with 100-foot waves featured the Caledonian Star, Bremen and QE2. Oceanographers now accept that ‘rogue waves’, sheer walls of water one hundred feet high, are a relatively frequent occurrence. The turning point in the scientific debate occurred on New Year’s Day 1995 when the Draupner oil rig in the North Sea was hit by an eighty-foot monster, which was clearly recorded on instrumentation and profoundly shook those previously sceptical that such watery leviathans could exist. Radar satellites from the German Aerospace Centre were trained on the problem and identified ten such giants in just three weeks. The German study, while locating some of these monsters off South Africa and in the North Pacific, also found 100-foot waves in the North Sea, in the Atlantic Ocean north of Scotland, near the Fastnet Lighthouse off the south-west coast of Ireland30 and in the Bay of Biscay; significantly all of the last four named regions featured in historical attempts to invade the British Isles. The latest scientific thinking, using the Schrodinger equation derived from quantum physics, is that there are both linear and non-linear waves, and that the non-linear type becomes a monster by sucking in energy from other waves in a storm.31

  Every week at least one ship is lost at sea in unexplained circumstances, which the shipping industry is, naturally, disposed to attribute to human error or poor maintenance; to face the genuine problem of freak waves would mean scrapping the entire merchant fleet and building vessels capable of dealing with these sea monsters. We can, therefore, be confident in asserting that in the great maritime duels between France and Britain in the ‘Second Hundred Years War’ (1689– 1815), both sides faced a terrifying common enemy.32 Hurricanes destroyed the elaborate French preparations to invade England in early 1744 and the attempt to land a huge army in Ireland in 1796. Those who portray the Royal Navy as an indomitable barrier to invasion often forget that in 1796 General Hoche got 15,000 men plus the Irish patriot Theobald Wolfe Tone safely to Bantry Bay, evading the Royal Navy, only to be dispersed by a force-twelve tempest. Tone remarked: ‘England has had its luckiest escape since the Armada.’33 In the fight against Napoleon in the period 1803–15, out of a total Royal Navy loss of 317 ships, calamitous seas accounted for 223 vessels; an educated guess would be that freak waves played more than a small part here.34 Pytheas of Massilia (Marseilles), the Greek sailor who circumnavigated the British Isles at the very time Alexander the Great was conquering the Persian Empire (in the 320s BC), reported 100-foot waves in Pentland Firth and has always been laughed to scorn for his hyperbole.35 But now we know the ancient wisdom was right after all. In fact the British authorities have known it longer than the scientific community but chose to hush it up. In 1943, while on Atlantic troop-carrying duty, the liner Queen Elizabeth was hit by two eighty-foot waves in quick succession, ploughing into the ‘hole in the ocean’ after the first one and nearly being engulfed by the second. In December 1942, the Queen Mary, carrying 15,000 troops from America to Britain, was hit broadside by a 92-foot wall of water north of Scotland, rolled at an angle of more than forty-five degrees and came within a few feet of capsizing. This would have been the greatest maritime disaster in history, involving ten times the fatalities of the Titanic.36 Conceivably, it could have altered the course of world history, for the effect on Allied morale at this crucial stage of World War Two might have been catastrophic. Hitler would have claimed that God (or the gods or Wotan) was on his side. The little-known story of the Queen Mary, therefore, illustrates two constants in British history: the culture of secrecy and the perilous nature of the seas that wash these islands.

  The dislocating impact of invasion on a nation-state can hardly be exaggerated. In the twentieth century Germany was invaded and occupied (1945); the potential revolutionary situation
thus engendered was avoided because Germany was divided and then immediately subsumed in the Cold War. Much the same happened in Italy, and the occupation and disruption of 1943–5 came close to returning a communist government in 1948. Spain suffered invasion and occupation in the Napoleonic era. Since the early nineteenth century Russia has suffered two major invasions, by Napoleon and Hitler, and a number of minor ones from Poles, Swedes and Turks. France was invaded three times between 1870 and 1940. Britain, protected by the seas and the Royal Navy, escaped all of this. In Britain the navy has always been the senior service, with the army relatively unimportant; in continental nations the army is necessarily one of the engines of power. A continental position also means involvement in almost permanent warfare, and wars on land are another of the major precipitants of revolution, especially if a nation-state has been unsuccessful.37 It is no accident that Britain’s only movement in the direction of a revolution of rank two was in the aftermath of the English Civil War. In Russia the debacle of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 triggered the Russian Revolution of 1905, and the much greater collapse on the Eastern Front in early 1917 precipitated the Russian Revolution of 1917 (which in turn led to civil war between Reds and Whites). French failure in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 produced the Paris Commune of 1871. Chinese failure against Japan in World War Two led directly to the triumph of the communists in the Chinese Revolution of 1949. In the Russian case, some scholars have tried to extend the argument by seeing the sequence war–revolution–civil war as a manifestation of a single phenomenon.38 It is sometimes objected captiously that not all wars lead to revolution and that sometimes the sequence is reversed, as with the French Revolution, leading to the wars of 1792–1815.39 This is a statement of the obvious: if war always produced revolution, the entire debate about the causality of revolutions would be otiose; we would know a priori that revolution would follow war as night follows day. War is not a sufficient condition for revolution nor even a necessary one, but it is often a key factor. The other important point about warfare is that it generates serious economic and financial consequences and can often ruin national treasuries.40 The locus classicus of this process was the way French participation in the War of American Independence led to financial crisis in the 1780s, the consequent summoning of the Estates-General in 1789, and all the momentous events that flowed from that. Again, this thesis is sometimes queried on the grounds that French expenses in the American war were 1.3 billion livres, which compared favourably with an expenditure of 1.2 billions in the War of Austrian Succession (1740–8) and the higher costs of 1.8 billions in the Seven Years War (1756–63).41 Yet the objections depend on seeing each war as a discrete entity; the salient point surely is that, because of the weakness of its taxation system and its accumulated debts, France could not really afford its intervention in the American War; in short, objections to the ‘French financial crisis triggered the French Revolution’ thesis depend on ignoring the cumulative wartime expenses of France in the eighteenth century.