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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 4: Shocks to the System

By the time you’re hearing this, I will already be on the road for a run of shows in Austin on October 3rd, San Francisco on October 4th and Seattle on October 5th. But if you want, you can still grab a ticket to any of those shows, and I think you should do that, because it’ll be a great time. I’m also looking forward to Boston, October 26th, Washington DC, October 27th, and Newark on October 29th.

Links to tickets for all of those shows are in the notes to this episode. Now, unfortunately, since last we spoke, the Chicago date has been postponed due to scheduling issues out of my hands. If you bought tickets to it already, thank you, thank you very much. Uh, the venue will be reaching out about what happens next. It’s beyond my control and purview, so unfortunately I’m not gonna be in Chicago, but all other places I will see you very, very soon.

Now, over the past few episodes, we have established that revolutions emerge from societies with sovereign regimes that were once successful. And not successful in the distant past, but successful quite recently, and quite recently successful because their political institutions modified and transformed with the times. It’s tough for a political apparatus to go even a single century without significant modification. Even something as apparently timeless as the British monarchy has only lasted all these centuries thanks to major changes to the monarchy — like, for example, then not having any real power anymore.

Here in the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, which was ratified in 1788, but there have been, at minimum, like a half dozen major transformations to the prevailing constitutional regime over the past 230 odd years. I mean, the constitution that was ratified wasn’t even the Constitution that was in effect like 20 years later, they were already amending the hell out of it, and it’s been continually shifting to fit the structure of American society ever since.

Now, as we’ve discussed, the stable equilibrium of successful regimes is always dynamic and full of conflict. Political rules, structures, expectations, evolve, grow, and shift constantly. No successful regime is successful because they are static. It’s always seeing organic replacement of members of its ruling class, and resultant changes in methods and objectives of statecraft as the political regime tends to be representative of and align with the prevailing productive forces. As those forces shift and transform, the state has to do the same, while always maintaining this little laundry list of things that needs to do: balance the interests inside the ruling class, maintain stable revenue streams to cover expenses, keep up credit worthiness in the eyes of the banking system, and always, always, always keep a preponderance of force over all other potential political challengers.

But the various regimes we’ve been dealing with, the regimes that become ancien regimes, stopped being able to navigate such social change for whatever reason. The balance between innovation and tradition falters. Disequilibrium enters the system. Larger conflicts open up among the rival conflicts of the ruling class. Ambitious elites outside the in-favor group grow larger and more confident and more active, as our ancien regimes generate either resistance to their innovations, or frustration with their lack of innovations. New ideas enter the picture: either wholly new concepts and ways of thinking, or new ways of framing old political conflicts in abstract and apocalyptic terms. And just to touch back on this, because Americans love telling a story about the glorious perpetual uniformity of our constitutional system stretching back to the days of the founders… I mean, there was a whole ass civil war in the middle of all this, and the entire constitutional structure had to be renegotiated on the battlefield because the former regime was unable to reconcile the differences of the American ruling class.

Now, today we’re gonna talk about the moment in the buildup to a revolution when a regime facing unstable disequilibrium is hit by a major shock to the system. This is not the trigger point that unleashes revolution, but a shock that moves all the pieces into a hardened, immovable place, such that a revolution doesn’t have to break out, but the odds have tipped so mightily in its favor that it kind of seems unavoidable. These big shocks to faltering systems reveal all the fault lines and ruptures and broken pieces which will lead through a few final acts of mismanagement, stupidity, luck, ambition, and desperation towards revolution.

And these shocks are not a quick thing that happened just before the trigger lights everything up. All the things we’re gonna talk about today precede that trigger point by like two or three years, a weirdly consistent number as I found as I went through all of this. Every revolution is different though, and so I believe it will be profitable to go through the specifics of each revolution we covered in the series to identify what the great shakes were that took disequilibrium to full blown revolutionary potential and then assess where we are at.

So the outbreak of the first English Civil War in 1642, what begins the English Revolution, was preceded three years earlier by the first of our system shocks: this is the Bishop’s War of 1639. This is when Charles attempted to create religious uniformity in his kingdoms by imposing the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on the Scots.

Charles, launching the Bishop’s War in 1639, is almost the platonic ideal of the Great Idiot move. Political disequilibrium had been rising during his years of personal rule, but if he just hadn’t gotten into anything that stretched the crown’s resources too thin or provoked too much passionate resistance, his personal rule could have gone on, like, indefinitely, But instead, he voluntarily plunged into a war that provoked hardened resistance on multiple fronts simultaneously: religion, politics, finances, ethnicity, nationality; all of these questions were opened up all at once. The Bishop’s War shocked the political system from disequilibrium into hardening polarization that also gave all of Charles’ enemies the point of leverage They needed to pursue their ambitions for power, and that was money. Charles needed money to prosecute the Bishop’s War, and he was gonna have to come to them for money. And to get that money he was gonna have to recall Parliament. And when they reconvened, they planned to make Parliament the arena of revolution. So 1642 is made possible by the system shock in 1639.

Now it’s a little harder with the American Revolution to pinpoint the exact shock that made conflicts over colonial administration following the Seven Years War truly unresolvable, the exact moment when colonial resistance to Crown and Parliament’s innovations became a true pre-revolutionary crisis. But if we don’t overthink it too much, one does tend to land on the showdown over the Tea Act of 1773, the resultant Boston Tea Party and Intolerable Acts. In response to these final shocks, rhetoric on both sides escalated in truly mutually exclusive directions. On one side of the Atlantic, there was the need to defend the principle of parliamentary supremacy, and on the other side of the Atlantic, the need to defend the sacred rights of Englishmen. And though it’s often not talked about quite as much as the closing of Boston and other onerous trade restrictions, uh, the Quebec Act is actually one of the major shocks, because it threatened Virginia planters like George Washington, who were speculating in Ohio land as much as the other parts of the Intolerable Acts affected the hooligans of Boston. So all those correspondence committees,pan-colonial coalition builders and active organization of the militias to defend the colonists from threats not just from below or from beyond but from above began to be taken very seriously, which set up the powder alarms of 1774 and 1775. But the final system shock to the American colonial regime came in May of 1773 with the Tea Act. It was, after all, extremely downhill from.

Now if the American Revolution is a bit nebulous about the precise moment of the system shock, the French Revolution can be drilled down to a very specific date. That date is August the eighth, 1786. This is the day Controller-General Calonne went to King Louis XVI and said, sir, we’re stony broke. We simply don’t have the money to pay our bills anymore. Opposition elements inside the French ruling class, particularly the rising Robe Nobility, had been resisting political, economic, and administrative reforms for a good fifteen years. But as awareness of the Crown’s financial distress circulated, they braced for what was sure to be the strongest push for those kinds of reforms yet, at a time when they had the best chance of resisting that push, because they wielded both the material resources and political rhetoric necessary to force a constitutional settlement on the Crown. And the response to the financial crisis — the desperation of the Crown, the ambition of the Robe Nobles and their incompatible rhetorical claims — drove France in to a political crisis that opened in the summer of 1786, just as a social crisis was breaking out that would snowball into 1789. But I don’t think that hail storms and bad harvests trigger the French Revolution absent the stunning shock that hit the system on August the eighth, 1780.

Now the Haitian Revolution was intimately tied to events in France, so much so that when we go looking for the pre-revolutionary shock, that would shatter the web of tension in Saint-Domingue, the answer is just… the French Revolution, As we saw repeatedly during the series on Haiti, events in Saint-Domingue were determined by the arrival of the latest news from France. The big whites of Saint-Domingue followed events in France closely, and when those events moved towards the Day of the Tiles in 1788, the subsequent call for the Estates-General, questions about what sort of representation the population of the colony should have broke out everywhere. The Big Whites started talking independence, talk that scared the hell outta the free people of color in the colony, as they knew full well that the Big Whites looked enviously at the young United States, which was a closed republic of landed white oligarchs defending slavery and answering only to themselves.

This created the conditions of an outright civil war between the Big Whites and the free people of color in the colony, as the free people of color could not and would not allow a Declaration of Independence in the name of racial apartheid to go through. These irreconcilable conflicts triggered by the French Revolution in 1789 — that’s the big shock here — made possible the real revolution that was set in motion in 1791, the slave insurrection. So you can almost say here that August the eighth, 1786 is doing double duty, because absent the French Revolution, there is no Haitian Revolution. At least, not the one we saw in our historical timeline.

Now, Spanish American Independence is very messy to explain because there’s multiple phases to those conflicts stretching out over like 25 years. But there was one big shock to the Spanish colonial empire in America, which as with Haiti, actually happened back in Europe. This is Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1807, which knocked off the Bourbon Monarchy and created absolute havoc in all Spanish jurisdictions. Up until that point, all the revolutionary hopes of people like Francisco de Miranda and young Simón Bolívar were proving hopelessly quixotic. The forces of prevailing order were simply too strong. But the catastrophic impact of the Napoleonic conquest in the Peninsular War so completely reshuffled the political alignments in the Americas that those dual axes of power we talked about, liberals against conservatives and centralists against federalists, saw each of those four factions come out about as strong as all the others. Now, events in Spanish America do not move in quick linear fashion towards revolutionary victory, but the shock of Napoleon opening up his bleeding ulcer in Spain in 1807 created the conditions against which potential revolutionary triggers could actually trigger a revolution. And one need only look at the spectacular failure of Miranda’s expedition as late as 1806 to see how important the Napoleonic invasion of 1807 was to the possibility of revolutionary action in Spanish America.

Now, when I went looking for the shock to the system of the French Revolution of 1830, I looked and I looked, and I was just striking out. Couldn’t find a war, not an economic crisis, not even really a financial crisis. There didn’t seem to be anything that looked like a great shock to the system the way that these things played out in other revolutions.

Until it dawned on me that the shock to the system came on September the 16th, 1824, and this is when Louis XVIII died and the Comte d’Artois ascended to the throne as King Charles X. The revolution of 1830 was so completely and thoroughly about Charles himself that his elevation to power was in and of itself the final shock to the Restoration Bourbons, a final shock that they didn’t survive. Now, the north star of his elder brother, Louie XVIII, had almost literally been maintained political equilibrium at all costs. It’s why Louis XVIII died with a crown on his head, and his brother did not. After Charles X came to power, France advanced rapidly towards disequilibrium and then revolution just simply by the very presence and behavior of Charles X. After he arrived, the incompatible and apocalyptic rhetoric on both sides of the political divide exploded in mutually exclusive directions by the late 1820s. Charles believed he was tasked with restoring a traditional order ordained by God; the liberals believed they had to defend the rights they had won through hard years of war and revolution and refused to give back. I’d venture to say that 1830 was likely the most avoidable of all the revolutions we’ve covered. Having even a slightly less combatively provocative monarch on the throne, the Kingdom of France sails through the summer of 1830 with nary a barricade in sight.

Now, one might argue that 1848 was just as avoidable, and indeed Francois Guizot’s reaction to the Banquet Campaign was an act of almost incomprehensible self-sabotage. But unlike 1830, Europe in 1848 had been laboring for a few years under a system shock caused by what we would often consider to be the traditional causes of modern revolution: economic and social upheavals tearing their inadequate political regimes asunder. I mean, the hungry forties were a thing. Crop failures and the potato famine led to a humanitarian crisis, which put pressure on the consumer economy, which triggered a business recession, which triggered worker layoffs and then, finally, that great split atom of revolutionary chaos, a financial crisis for the state, as tests to the credit-worthiness of the conservative regimes of Europe forced them to make concessions to those whose money they needed to survive. So the shock to the system that made 1848 possible arrived around 1846, with widespread crop failures and the cascading effects thereof.

Now, our series on the Paris Commune was really two revolutions in quick succession. The first was the overthrow of the Second Empire and the Declaration of the Third Republic, the other was the Revolt of Paris and the Declaration of the Commune. The political disequilibrium of the Second Empire had metastasized after Napoleon III’s run of success in the 1850s gave way to his run of failures in the 1860s. And even absent the Franco-Prussian War, the liberal opposition to Napoleon III was riding so high by the late 1860s that it’s kind of hard to not see France ending up with institutions that look an awful lot like the Third Republic one way or the other, whether there was a titular figurehead monarch or not. But history goes the way history goes, and the Franco-Prussian War did happen, and even though this particular shock did not proceed its revolution by years like all the other examples, the Franco-Prussian War is when the political dynamic changed so thoroughly that revolution became possible, and then probable, and then, an accomplished fact. So the Franco Prussian war is the shock to the system.

But the other revolution nested inside the overthrow of the Second Empire is the Paris Commune, and its intractable political conflict with leaders of the newly proclaimed Third Republic. This was rooted in the Siege of Paris; that was the shock. The experience of the Parisians during the siege, their isolation and estrangement from the rest of France, coupled with the not wholly unjustified belief that the rest of France was happily and purposefully sacrificing them to the Germans… it radicalized them, polarized relations between them and the leaders of the Third Republic, such that when the siege was lifted, there was very little common ground for anyone to stand on. There was very little common ground anyone wanted to stand on.

Now, of all our Great Idiots of History, I gotta say, I think Porfirio Díaz was the best of the worst. He was the least dumb idiot of them all. He was extremely gifted at creating and maintaining stable political equilibrium in Mexico. And in 19th century Mexico, that’s no mean feat. But by the time the 20th century rolled around, old Porfirio had lost his nimble edge after running into a question he would not answer, possibly because he could not answer: the question of who would succeed him in power. It was the succession question more than anything else that unraveled the Porfiriato, because with the political and economic and geographic factions of the Mexican ruling class balanced so delicately, the minute Díaz named a successor that represented one of those factions, all the others were going to be very angry. To say nothing of the possibility of naming a successor more popular than he was, which might result in his immediate overthrow — that’s why he stayed away from Bernardo Reyes. So Díaz stalled. He tilted this way, while leaning that way, and in the end got so focused on avoiding naming a successor who was too popular that he named Ramón Corral, who everyone hated, which turned out to be even worse. Then, as economic and social upheavals rocked Mexico in circumstances very similar to 1848, Diaz himself dropped the final shock into the system: this is the Creelman Interview of 1908, where he said, “I won’t seek reelection in 1910.” This interview created a zero sum game contest for the presidency of 1910, pitting every Mexican faction against every other Mexican faction that none could afford to lose. And then Díaz changed his mind and ran for reelection in 1910, but by then, too many people were too committed to succeeding him to allow him to not be succeeded.

Now finally with the Russia series, we talked actually about two great revolutions: 1905 and 1917. And the shock to the system in both cases was disaster in foreign war. 1905 was caused by the massive unforced error that is the Russo-Japanese war, which very nicely brings us full circle: a full revolution, back to Charles I and the Bishop’s War. In both cases, we got a military conflict launched by the sovereign thanks to a mix of hubris, stupidity, and myopia that rebounds so spectacularly in their faces that it absolutely shatters the legitimate foundations of their respective regimes. Now, World War I wasn’t quite so specifically Nikki’s fault — though it is fun to remember that he got into World War I, partly because he believed it would undercut revolutionary threats that had been escalating prior to the war.

(Good job there, didn’t work.)

But in both 1905 and 1917, the shock of defeats, the mismanagement and the ineptitude, created huge anti-regime coalitions ranging from conservative nobles to bomb-throwing anarchists, all of whom were so frustrated by the government’s stupidity the disequilibrium actually passed into a new political equilibrium that coalesced outside the infinitesimally small inner circle of the tsar’s nuclear family. Like, there was a new kind of equilibrium that had emerged from World War I — it just excluded Nicholas. So very clearly in both 1905 and 1917, the expectation of quick military victory giving way to prolonged humiliations and defeat are what shocked an already unstable autocratic system into revolutionary upheaval.

Now, an observation we can make here after reviewing all of this is that almost no two revolutions faced identical shocks to their respective systems. There is very clearly not one weird trick for shocking an already shaky system into revolution.

Now, war is a pretty good culprit in all of this, we do see this repeatedly:in Stuart England and Romanov Russia, both proactively started wars that undid them. The Spanish American Empire also got shocked by a war, but they were invaded, conquered, and occupied by an outside force, that’s a very different thing. Now the Franco-Prussian war was more similar to Stuart England and Romanov Russia, and was absolutely the thing that loaded the Second Empire into its deathbed. So for those four revolutions, I think war really is kind of the answer.

But war is not always the answer. The French Revolution, the greatest revolution of them all, was not shocked by a war. There was no war to be had. It was all about a state financial crisis that was so bad the French couldn’t even do wars anymore. The American Revolution was meanwhile just about intolerable administrative reforms, it also had nothing to do with the war. The Haitian Revolution was triggered by the collapse of its home government, not unlike Spanish America, but in this case, it was not caused by invasion and occupation, just good old homegrown chaos. The Revolution of 1830 came down almost entirely to the conduct of the individual monarch, had nothing to do with anything but Charles. 1848 saw widespread economic and social distress that outstripped the ability of the European regimes to cope. And then finally, Porfirian Mexico followed 1848-style social problems with financial panics and recessions, but was mainly about a regime unable to answer the question of succession, which is the one time we really saw something like a succession crisis trigger a revolution in the whole series. Which surprises me because the history of Rome was so full of revolts and insurrections and revolutions surrounding succession time.

But whether the shock was military or economic or political, when it came, the effect was the same, and that’s the point. Competing factions in the ruling class polarized away from mere disequilibrium into something far more combative. Because in all the cases, from the Bishop’s war to World War I, the regime was exposed as weak, ineffectual, and incompetent, that’s what the shock does. There was now blood in the water and ambitious elites see a golden opportunity to grow their power and authority at the expense of the weak and ineffectual and incompetent sovereign. The shock to the system means that it now looks like a very good time to strike, the time to risk it all, rise up and attack, instead of meekly backing down in the face of the forces of traditional order. Because more than anything else, it was no longer clear that the sovereign held that all important preponderance of force. And critically, as we talked about last week, the breakaway faction of the ruling class looking to capitalize on the regime’s apparent weakness was now armed with new ideas and theories and phrases that elevated their struggle from mere self-interest up into the lofty realms of liberty and rights and justice.

They staked their lives in fortunes and sacred honor to the idea that they fought for more than just a refusal to pay new taxes. And when those kind of lofty motives, that lofty rhetoric, meet the opportunity created by a shock to the system and the awareness that the regime is now weak and ineffectual and incompetent, well, backing down becomes as unthinkable as standing up had once been.

Next week, the people are going to start standing up. And things are about to start getting out of hand. Appendix 5 is trigger time — when all the kindling has been laid, fuel has been piled up, and the sparks are flying all over the place. And there have been plenty of times in history where even at this late hour, even when an unstable regime has been hit by heavy shock to the system, revolution still does not break out because the final triggers don’t hit just right. But we’re not here to talk about any of those.

Because, what’s the fun in that?