Before we get going this week. I wanna remind everyone that tickets are on sale now for seven live dates with me, Mike Duncan, coming this October, where I will be performing my traveling monologue, The Stories of History, wherein we will discuss how building historical narratives explains where we find ourselves as we forever attempt to answer that great question, how did we get here?

Tickets are on sale now for shows in Austin on October 3rd, San Francisco on October 4th and Seattle on October 5th, and then tickets are on sale for the second batch at the end of the month: Chicago on October 25th, Boston on October 26th, Washington DC on October 27th, and Newark on October 29th, and we now do have links for all the ticket pages, including Newark. They will be included in the show notes to this episode. So go forth, buy tickets, come on out, and I’ll see you there.

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix Two: The Ancien Regime

One of the inspirations for the Revolutions Podcast is an old, old book called Anatomy of Revolution by Crane Brinton. It first came out in 1939, so it’s an old, old book. Brinton set out to compare and contrast four great revolutions: the English Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, and then attempt to identify enough structural similarities between them to at least gesture in the direction of the existence of a uniform process for all revolutions. I read Anatomy of Revolution once when I was young, and then came back around to it much later in life, just as I was wrapping up the History of Rome. And if you don’t remember this story, what happened is I reread Anatomy of Revolution because I was taking a class at the University of Texas, where I had to write a paper about Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers’ Movement. The paper I wrote applied the patterns Brinton identified in Anatomy of Revolution to the United Farm Workers Movement. Writing that paper is when the idea for the Revolutions Podcast first struck me. So, here we are about a decade later, coming back around to follow in Brinton’s footsteps. Not to copy his model, but to walk through the ten examples that we have at our disposal to identify in our own way and to our own satisfaction what kind of identifiable patterns exist within the random chaos of revolutionary history.

Now as we go through this process over the next several appendices, we will be sticking tight to my boring thesis that major historical ruptures like revolutions are the result of individual agency acting upon large structural conditions. Both factors need to be taken into account when describing the development and unfolding of a revolution. But hopefully along the way, we’ll find some similarities both in the structures — the larger forces impacting events — and also the decisions made by individual actors. All revolutions after all must have at least a few things in common, otherwise they wouldn’t be recognizable as the same type of thing.

So I want to begin where all revolutions begin: with an existing political structure. You can’t have a revolution without something to overthrow, something to turn the regime into the ancien regime. If you’ve read around in revolutionary history, you’ll find historians and authors often using that term, ancien regime, which was obviously first applied in terms of the French Revolution, to any pre-revolutionary state, whether we’re talking about Tsarist Russia, the Mexican Porfiriato, or the kingdoms of Charles Stewart. And one thing English speakers need to always be aware of is that the word ancien can be a bit of a faux ami — a false friend. It looks very much like we’re talking about an ancient regime, something deeply rooted in the past, a sovereign entity that has prevailed for time immemorial and whose roots stretch deep into the misty past. You know, an ancient regime. But in point of fact, the French word ancien doesn’t mean ancient, and instead it simply means old or former. And so you’ll see the word used like l’ancien ministre de la culture, which means simply, the former minister of culture. That minister could have had their job for like a year and lost it last week and they would still be l’ancien ministre de la culture, the former minister of culture. They were never the ancient minister of culture.

Now I bring this up because as we run through our various ancien regimes, we find that they are not in fact very ancient at all, and most of them are a very recent vintage. With the kingdoms of Charles Stewart, for example, we’re talking about a dynasty that had been in place for a mere 22 years when young Charles I first took over from his late father James I in 1625. And this arrival of a new form of government wasn’t a small thing. The Stewarts represented the unification of Scotland and England under a single crown and brought with them wholesale revisions to the political order that had prevailed under the Tudors. When the revolution broke out, it was responding to something quite new, not very old. In the American Revolution, we have a colonial regime that had been in place for 150 years, which is quite old compared to many of our other ancien regimes, and it is worth noting in this context that the American colonists were rising up as much in defense of their traditional way of life as they were advancing something new and different.

In France, Louis 16th inherited a kingdom that had been completely remade by Louis 14th less than a hundred years earlier. The French ancien regime, par excellence, bore little resemblance to the truly ancient feudal modes of government. The royal absolutism of the 18th century was a very recent innovation, and it is against that recent innovation that the French Revolution would be staged.

Like Anglo America, the French colonial administration of Saint-Domingue had been around for 150 odd years, but it also was not until the mid 18th century, in the generation or two before the Haitian Revolution, that the French government back home started to take a real interest in how the colony was administered.

Now the Spanish Empire in the Americas was of course centuries old by the time the independence movements break out, but remember that after the War of Spanish Succession in 1714, the Spanish crown passed from the Hapsburgs to the Bourbons, and the colonial apparatus underwent a top to bottom overhaul. When Francisco de Miranda was born in 1750, the colonial regime against which he would set himself was barely a generation old.

Now, moving on to the French Revolution of 1830, we don’t have to do much here because obviously it was staged against a regime that had been in place for a mere fifteen years. The same is true of the French Revolution of 1848, which was staged against a regime that had been in place for a mere eighteen years. Now, of course, elsewhere in Europe in 1848, the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns obviously had deep dynastic roots, but between the reforms initiated in the 18th century by enlightened despots like Joseph II and Frederick the Great, and radical changes imposed during the Napoleonic invasions, the legal structures and political alignments and methods of statecraft in Central Europe were, in 1848, like 30 or 40 years old at best.

The Second French Empire then was less than 20 years old when it was overthrown and replaced with the Third French Republic in 1871, the Mexican Porfiriato had just celebrated its 30th anniversary when it started to fall apart, and then finally we have Russia — and the Romanovs had of course been in power for like 300 years, but much like the rest of Europe, the tsarist regime had been changed and changed again, by figures like Peter and Catherine, and then the political settlement was reorganized again after the Napoleonic Wars. This means that the Revolution of 1905 was staged against a regime that was like a century old, and then 1917 obviously comes against a post-1905 settlement, which had been in effect for a scant 12 years.

So acknowledging that in general, our ancien regimes are not very ancient, but in fact, quite young, we must also note that they started out life very successful. They must have. Now, given that the only reason we are talking about these regimes is because they are on the verge of spectacular collapse, it’s often easy to forget that at some point, these regimes must have worked. A regime does not last long enough to become an ancien regime unless it was able at some point to answer the political questions of its own particular time and place.

Now, what I mean by that is that every time and place has its own way of assessing the legitimacy and solidity and resiliency of a sovereign regime, whoever or whatever that sovereign may be. The political system might be grappling with clashes between regional interests, clashes between families or ideological factions, clashes between religions; all of these clashes, ultimately about the basic question of who will wield power and who will not.

So let’s take a random example: the political question facing Porfirio Díaz in the mid 1870s. In Diaz’s case, the great political question facing Mexico was how to balance the central power with regional powers, balance conservative factions with liberal factions, and then ensure that Mexico would keep up economically in a rapidly industrializing world. And Días was able to answer these questions with the famous — or infamous — construction, “pan o palo,” bread or the stick. With one hand, he offered favorable inducements, and with the other, menaced deadly force in order to achieve the political stability which had alluded Mexico since independence. And initially he was very good at this — Porfirio Díaz would not have lasted long in power had he been bad at it.

And Louis 14th did a very similar thing in France in the late 1600s and early 1700s, and though the theatrical trappings of court life at Versailles would eventually become an absurd joke, when they were first rolled out, Louis had to tame the unruly French nobility, and he successfully did it. He answered the great political question of his era, and it’s why his system of royal absolutism stuck. Though, before we move on, we should also apply the lessons of Greek drama, because we often find in these regimes that the very attributes that made them successful initially eventually become the liabilities that take them down.

But this brings us to the question of what makes a successful and stable regime? Now throughout history, most of what goes into forging political stability is about balancing the interests of the ruling class. It is not until comparatively late in the game that popular forces are invited into the political process, and even in our age of democratic rule, we all know that to a huge degree, our political system is still shaped by the interest of our ruling class. Now satisfying the ruling class is critical, because that ruling class are the ones who control enough wealth, patronage, and resources to challenge the wealth, patronage, and resources of the sovereign itself.

And when we talk about the ruling class, we mean it in two different ways. The wider definition covers everyone in the socioeconomic stratum from which political leaders are drawn, and who control large amounts of the polity’s wealth and resources. But within this wider ruling class, there is a more narrow definition that simply includes those members of the ruling class who are actually ruling; those who hold the ministerial offices and other influential positions and who thus wield power. Not all members of the wider ruling class can be members of this more narrow ruling class, and it creates the ever present conflict between those members of the ruling class in favor with the sovereign, and those members of the ruling class out of favor with the sovereign. Who is in favor and who is outta favor can be decided by royal whim or democratic elections, but no matter what, wherever you look throughout history, there is always gonna be a faction of the ruling classes in favor, wielding actual authority, and a faction of the ruling classes out of favor, who do not have, but would very much like to possess, that authority.

The thing that makes a stable regime stable is not that it has eliminated all opposition from this out of favor wing of the ruling class, but rather that it has made those out of favor as small and ineffectual as possible, unable to pose a real challenge to the regime. For most of human history, that was the definition of political stability. If we take a little detour back to the history of Rome, we should remember that the two consuls per year structure of the Roman republic was, yes, about ensuring that one person could never build up or wield individual power for long, but it was also about spreading the highest offices around to ensure that every family in the ruling class got a cookie when it was their turn. It was a big part of the structural stability of the Roman republic, because there was never a faction of the ruling class permanently out of favor. A family could stand a rival clan, holding a consulship for a year because they knew that next year it would be their turn. Practically the entire ruling class of the Roman republic thus got their turn in their turn, so no one felt compelled to overthrow the system. And it’s a big reason why the Roman republic lasted for 500 years.

But if we look beyond the bounds of the ruling class, a stable and successful sovereign must have their legitimacy at least tacitly acknowledged by other key groups, demographics, and constituencies within the society: educated professionals, intellectuals, writers and journalists, smaller scale merchants and artisans, rural peasants and urban wage laborers. Unless the pan o palo is in broad and wide effect, forces are gonna emerge who feel no loyalty to the regime whatsoever, and who might also feel like they have a good shot at overthrowing that regime. And this is where the sovereign’s imperative to balance and satisfy the interest of the ruling class becomes so crucial: because all these other social economic classes are usually influenced by or controlled by some faction or other inside the ruling class. Forces that might be unleashed by an unhappy lord are easily kept in check by a happy lord. And by lord, I hear mean not just some landed aristocrat from fuedal Europe, but maybe a corporate employer, or a media mogul, or a local political leader. A sovereign must ensure these ruling class elements use their power and wealth and authority to support the regime, and not, for example, go the full Duc d’Orléans, and invite the dreaded rabble into answer the political question for themselves.

Now, the last thing I wanna discuss here on the political side is arguably the most important, and that is that a stable sovereign must have a preponderance of force. They must command and control armed forces that are superior to any other potential challenger. The bread must be skillfully distributed and keep everybody happy, yes, but the stick must be quick and strong. Anyone contemplating a challenge to the regime must be forced into the conclusion that it’s just not worth it. The regime’s forces are simply too strong. Because if someone contemplating such a challenge concludes, hey, maybe I can pull this off, the sovereign is already in pretty big trouble.

So all of our ancien regimes successfully displayed and deployed armed forces that could overwhelm all potential challengers. And of course, this is achieved partly by building up the sovereign’s own forces, but also by dismantling and disarming potential opposition groups. Now this needs to be done carefully with a lot of favors and privileges and straight cash bribes to make it all go down easier, but it is important to make sure that any potential challenger to your regime cannot muster the resources or the forces necessary to actually do it. As long as a regime maintains a preponderance of force, no one will challenge them, but once people start to suspect that, hey, maybe the stick is not as quick or as strong as it used to be, well, that’s when revolutions happen.

So, okay, moving on from the political aspects of our ancien regimes, let’s hop over to economics. I think in general what we find in all of our ancien regimes is that in the generation or two prior to the revolution we see a lot of dynamic economic growth. Now we are talking here about the stable phase of our ancien regimes, not about the moments we’ll talk about next week, when shortfalls or crop failures or recessions throw the political equilibrium out of balance. What I’m talking about is before all of that, and there, we typically find a generation or two’s worth of economic growth and increasing wealth, rather than any kind of stagnation or decline. We see this from the advancing commercial prosperity of Britain in the 1600s to the generally increasing fortunes of colonial elites, whether they be Anglo, Spanish, or French. Europe in the 19th century is obviously a story of rapid capitalist growth. You can say a lot of different things about 19th century European economics, but one thing you cannot say is that it was stagnant or declining.

Later in the series, we found both Mexico and Russia in very similar places in the latter bit of the 19th century. Found on the periphery of the capitalist empires, they initiated rapid industrial growth to keep up. Now critically, the fortunes made during this period of economic growth are not necessarily distributed evenly, and thus create two revolutionary forces that will act both in concert and contradiction. On the one hand, we have the growing ambition and self-confidence of those who have benefited from dynamic economic growth, and on the other, the growing anger and bitterness of those exploited and impoverished by new economic modes of product. The fact that we find a lot of economic dynamism in pre-revolutionary societies naturally lends itself to talking in Marxist terminology. A natural outgrowth of the sovereign’s imperative to maintain stable relations within the ruling class, and the imperative of that ruling class to have a reliable sovereign, means that there is invariably a convergence of the economic systems and political systems of a society. The socioeconomic base creates the political structure, which turns around and further entrenches the organization of that base. So, a society where the means of production are owned by major landowners in a medieval agrarian society means that the political system will naturally develop a stable equilibrium that accounts for how wealth influence and authority are distributed in a feudal agrarian society. This is gonna be different from a heavily industrialized urban capitalist economy, which will naturally draw in different units:w corporations, banks, leaders of trade and industry and commerce, and their beliefs about what an acceptable political system looks like need to be taken into account.

And so, in the Marxist account of revolutionary history, a shift in the economic base, like the one from feudalism to capitalism, is gonna trigger revolutionary energy, when the old political arrangement of the super structure no longer fit the base. And the fact that we see shifts in economic activities and a lot of dynamic economic growth in pre-revolutionary ancien regimes does lend some credence to the notion that to disconnect between the economic base and the political superstructure is a critical source of disequilibrium that will require a political response.

So everything we’ve spoken about thus far has had to do with the structures of these societies, their political, economic, and social arrangements, the structural backdrop for historical action. But there is this whole other side of the revolutionary equation, and that is individual agency. When the moment comes for a nimble political response, who’s taking the call? Two leaders might be given exactly the same set of structural conditions; one leader is able to navigate the problem, the other triggers a revolution. Not because the structures they inherited made revolution inevitable, but because of their individual choices, And one thing I am now willing to say, after all of the revolutions that we’ve covered, is that none of them had to happen. None of them were inevitable. All of them broke out when and where they did partly because of the quality of the leadership at the moment of the crisis. And even more to the point, the reason there was a crisis at all was because the quality of the leadership was substandard. Individual agency is a key component of creating revolutions, and there’s nothing quite like incompetence to create a revolution. The roster of leaders for our various ancien regimes is an absolute rogues gallery of buffoons, blunders, and absolute fail sons: King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland, the members of the cabinets of George III the 1760s and 1770s, Louis 16th, the administrators of Saint-Domingue in the 1780s, Charles IV and Ferdinand VII of Spain, Charles X, King of France, Louis Philippe, King of the French, Ferdinand I of Austria, Napoleon III, Porfirio Díaz, and finally Tsar Nicholas II. These are some of the biggest dumbass leaders in history, and from quite early in the process of making the Revolutions Podcast, I realized that there is a Great Idiot Theory that exists right alongside any great Man theory of history: that as often as history is made by the brilliant, the wise, and the bold, it’s made by the ignorant, and the incompetent, and the weak. Every single ancien regime we have talked about on the show did not have to fall into a revolution. It took the very special and unique incompetence of each member of our rogues gallery of dumbasses to make it happen.

The single character trait that all of our great idiots seem to have in common is a fundamental lack of imagination. And this lack of imagination usually manifests itself as pigheaded inflexibility. If revolutionary energy is building, that means the regime is facing new political questions it may not have the answer to. Successful leaders use their imagination to dream up new answers to these new questions instead of stubbornly insisting on sticking with the old answers. And what I witnessed a lot in the run up to revolutions is kings and emperors and ministers being very insistent and demanding, where they should have been flexible and creative. Tsar Nicholas could have easily forged a settlement within Russia’s ruling class that would’ve allowed him and his family to remain on the throne forever. There might still be a Tsar of Russia. Instead, he refused to let in even the smallest shaft of imaginative light, such that he could see a positive place for himself, his family, and his dynasty in an ever so slightly reorganized political system that acknowledged the existence of changes in economic, intellectual, and social currents. a different leader, making slightly different decisions, dies happy in a big fancy bed instead of getting shot in a basement.

The Great Idiot Theory of revolutionary history also has a very specific subset to it. It’s not just that our sovereigns and their ministers are doing a bad job and therefore bad things happen — although that is very much the case — it’s also that people around the bumbling sovereign, who are smart and ambitious and capable, get extremely frustrated with the very act of watching the bumbling sovereign make such a hash of things. It’s offensive to their intellect and their pride. Why is my great nation or kingdom being ruled by such an idiot? And thus offended, these educated members of the ruling class start entertaining the idea that it might be necessary to remove the incompetent sovereign. Incompetent rulers will always invite challenges to their rule, and incompetent rulers presiding over society whose structural forces are generating discontented energy… well, that’s gonna invite a revolution.

So to sum this up, how do we define a stable regime? We define it as one whose economic and social arrangements align with the political regime of the sovereign, producing a general sense of the regime’s legitimacy. This consensus is forged with both bread and stick, with bribes and inducements existing alongside brutal oppression and persecution. These regimes must also have competent leaders in charge to grapple with the ever changing set of political questions, as the passage of time provokes new questions to be answered. It was once the case for each of our ten pre-revolutionary regimes that we talked about on the show that they were stable, that they had equilibrium, that they were all once regimes and not ancien regimes.

Next week, we will turn our attention to the moment when that transition starts to happen. Everything we talked about today was about establishing and maintaining stable political equilibrium. But what happens when elements start entering the system that create disequilibrium? When the old political settlements, agreements, privileges and penalties are no longer enough to keep the discontentment, anger, and above all ambition contained? When the structural forces of society begin grinding into one another and creating revolutionary friction, deft leadership is required to find a new equilibrium. And if, instead of deft leadership, you have one of the great idiots of history running the show?

Well, my friends, I think your regime is about to become ancien.