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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
So far in the appendices, we’ve taken our once successful sovereign regimes to the precipice of revolution. About ten, fifteen, maybe twenty odd years before the revolution, destabilizing disequilibrium enters the picture, caused by an increasing inability of the sovereign to balance competing political interests in the ruling class, or manage the prevailing and ever changing socioeconomic conditions.
Then, two to three years or so before the revolution breaks out, this unstable system gets hit with a shock that hardens political divisions, draws sharp battlelines, and makes peaceful reconciliation increasingly impossible. This was especially true for those challenging the regime — not just because they were afraid of what might happen if they backed down, but because they now saw the sovereign as weak, incompetent, and ineffective. They saw how the sovereign behaved to all these crises and shocks and deemed them uniquely vulnerable to attack. So failing to press their advantage would be an unforgivably missed opportunity. And so everyone pushed on towards the precipice.
And today, we are gonna talk about the moment everyone plunges over the edge together. The thing that takes all of this from potential revolutionary energy to kinetic revolutionary energy, and that is: the triggers.
Now, before we get into this, let’s remind ourselves that nothing we have talked about so far guarantees a revolution. In fact, even at this late hour, no revolution necessarily follows from any of the conditions we’ve described so far. A sovereign can manage its political equilibrium in perpetuity. If disequilibrium enters the picture, the sovereign can regain its footing. It can change, adapt and reform. Even after the shock to the system has come around, there’s no guarantee that the crisis will meet a dramatic revolutionary trigger.
More than anything else, revolutions are rare. They’re so rare, they’re super rare. And that’s partly why they’re so fascinating, because they are so uncommon. The uncommon draws our attention. The common place does not. So most of the time the volcano, gurgles and shakes, but ultimately does not erupt. The logic is never, if there is potential revolutionary energy, then there will ultimately be kinetic revolutionary energy. We must always, always, always keep this in mind. If you’re a gambler and you would like to make a fortune, always bet against revolution. Besides if you lose that bet and a revolution happens, maybe the revolution will wipe out all your debts. So either way you can’t lose.
But obviously we are here talking about the times revolutions did break out, when all the conditions were ripe and a trigger kicked that energy from potential to kinetic. So I wanna start today by running quickly through the trigger points as I see them through all of our various revolutions, and then offer some thoughts on what we see. Now what’s interesting about a revolutionary trigger is that it’s simultaneously only obvious in retrospect — because at the time, it’s nearly impossible to tell if this is just a dramatic event or if it’s a revolutionary trigger. We won’t know until we know the future. But at the same time, the trigger also needs to have enough dramatic impact in the moment that people recognize it at the time as a big deal. Something important that has happened.
So nearly all the triggers we’ll talk about today were recognized as such pretty quickly, even if nobody planned for them to happen, and they just sort of blew up at random. Because that’s been a running theme of the show: that certain conditions prevail, that many people are actively pushing towards a revolution, but when the deal actually goes down, almost no one predicts or plans the actual, literal trigger in advance. They’re not planned. They’re simply capitalized upon by opportunistic improvisation. Revolutions are rarely scripted in advance. They are almost always adlibbed.
So as we go through what I think of as the triggers of the revolutions that we’ve covered so far in the show, your mileage may vary. You might disagree with me here and there. But I am gonna offer what my read is on all of these events.
So in the English Revolution, for example, we have this 1639 to 1641 crisis period, after this shock to the system that was the Bishop’s War. There’s the Short Parliament, the impeachment of William Laud, the trial and execution of Stratford, the rebellion in Ireland — which I actually referred to in the podcast specifically as the direct trigger of the civil war.
But I think the even more direct trigger was when King Charles showed up at Parliament on January the fourth, 1642, to arrest the five members. This attempted usurpation of parliamentary rights sparked outrage in the city of London. Students, apprentices, journeymen, and clerks all took to the streets in the days that followed, creating such a tumult that King Charles and his family had to secretly flee the city on January 10th. And this is when things went from confrontation to revolution. The sovereign was driven from his capital, leading to parliament’s militia ordinance, which gave them the right to raise armed forces without the need to consult their runaway king, and that directly set up the civil war. Charles himself, as we know, would not return to London until he himself faced trial and execution.
Now, the trigger for the American Revolution is obviously the shot heard round the world, the battles of Lexington and Concord. This is famous, we made it famous, it’s almost impossible to disentangle ourselves from it. Though it is worth mentioning that the battle of Lexington and Concord was actually the fourth time British regulars had gone out to secure colonial munition. There was the Powder Alarm around Boston in September, 1774; then again in Portmouth in December, 1774; then Salem in February, 1775; and only then do we come to the events in Lexington and Concord in April of 1775. It’s also worth noting that just five days later there was a thing called the Gunpowder Incident down in Williamsburg, Virginia, pitting Lord Dunmore against a militia raised by Patrick Henry.
So, why was Lexington and Concord the trigger, and all those other things. Just things that happened? Who knows? That’s just the way things go.
Now in the French Revolution, it’s also impossible to disentangle ourselves from the cataclysmic, earth-shattering Fall of the Bastille in July 1789. That is the traditional, historical, dramatic beginning of the French Revolution, even if a bunch of stuff leading up to that moment is also a part of the French Revolution. But the Fall of the Bastille was not really the trigger, was it? The trigger came three days earlier, when Louis XVI fired Controller-General Jacques Necker. That’s what set off all that decisive unrest in Paris, as the Parisians believed Necker’s dismissal was a prelude to the king shuttering the National Assembly and ordering regular soldiers to occupy Paris. So when the King made this incredibly provocative move, they rose up in defense of the revolution that had only just then gotten going.
Now, none of these first three triggers was premeditated; as I said, most things are improvised on the fly — just things happen, and people respond. Now, in future appendices, we’ll get to the second revolutionary waves that often fall with the first waves, and many of those involve triggers that are, in fact, planned in advance: the Insurrection of August the 10th, Lenin’s, October Revolution, et cetera, et cetera. But the first time we get to something that seems truly premeditated comes with the Haitian Revolution. It arrives in August of 1791 with the Bois Caïman ceremony. There was no immediate threat from the colonial authorities that drove the Haitian slaves into revolt. There was no especially provocative thing they did. The slaves just saw an opportunity, got together, and they did it.
Now with Spanish American Independence, it’s obviously going to be a vast array of events out there, because we’re talking about things that unfolded across an entire continent. But we can point to those first cries of freedom in 1808 and 1809 and 1810, mostly triggered by news from Spain that there was this new national junta that had taken over, and was inviting participation from the American component to the Spanish Empire. In the specific case of Grand Columbia, though we can turn to April 1810, when a small group from Spain arrived claiming to represent a regency council, that other people on board the same ship told the locals… didn’t really exist, it wasn’t actually a thing. And so within days, a large crowd was marching to confront the Captain General in Caracas. They demanded their own junta that would be answerable only to the king himself, who wasn’t actually in power. This got them all rolling downhill towards a formal declaration of independence by the end of the year.
Now in 1830, we have as clear a cut trigger as we’re ever likely to find: it’s King Charles X publishing the Four Ordinances on July the 26th, 1830, which immediately sets off a wave of popular resistance, the formation of barricades by the people of Paris, and the self-directed recall of the National Guard soon to be placed under the command of old General Lafayette. The trigger here is easy. It’s the Four Ordinances. And once again, the regime has done something provocative and people are rising up in response.
Now in 1848, we know the final crisis revolved around the Banquet Campaign, with Francois Guizot ordering the last and biggest of the planned banquets shuttered in February 1848. But though tumultuous unrest started immediately, on February the 22nd, it was not actually clear what the ultimate result of this unrest would be, nor how much, if anything, the regime would have to concede in order to restore order. And this was true until about 9:30 PM on February the 23rd, 1848, when French troops fired on Parisian demonstrators, leaving scores of dead and wounded. This moment was referred to then as the massacre of the Capucines, and it turned the crisis into a revolution. This is the moment. This is the trigger. Louis Philippe was riding outta Paris into exile by noon the very next day.
And as for the rest of Europe, as we talked about in Season Seven, when you make a circuit around the continent, you can basically track the beginning of each revolution in Germany or Italy or Austria or Hungary by how long it took to deliver news bulletins from Paris. That was the trigger there. What happened in Paris?
And the third time we see news bulletins serving as a revolutionary trigger — I think the first was Spanish America, the second was central and southern Europe in 1848 — is the collapse of the Second Empire into the Third Republic, which began as soon as news of the Battle of Sedan arrived. As with Spanish America, it was similarly triggered by news of a massive political vacuum opening up. The emperor had been captured, what are we gonna do now? Let’s declare another republic.
The trigger for the Paris Commune, on the other hand, was far more standard issue, where the regime does something and people mobilized to resist. And it’s in fact very similar to the American Revolution: the regime was trying to take the cannons of Paris the same way the British had tried to secure the powder of the American colonies, and the people rose up in opposition.
Now, the Mexican Revolution followed immediately on the heels of the clearly rigged presidential election of 1910. And while the arrest of Francisco Madero and thousands of his supporters in June 1910 probably planted some very fertile revolutionary seeds, the real final trigger that drove Madero and his inner circle into revolution was the National Congress ratifying the fraudulent election in October 1910. This is when they reelected Porfirio Díaz to the presidency and more provocatively made the hated Ramon Corral, vice president and de facto heir. This was the immediate trigger for Madero to publish the plan of San Luis Potosi and raise a revolutionary army in the north.
Now, the Russian Revolution of 1905 comes with one of the most infamous of all triggers, the events of Bloody Sunday. This is when the tsar’s troops fired on unarmed protestors and drove nearly all segments of Russian society into a vast revolutionary push to demand fundamental political reform.
But what’s kind of funny about the trigger of the revolution of 1917, one of the greatest revolutions in human history, is that it was not about the regime doing something provocative or some apocalyptic piece of news from abroad. It’s just that February 23rd, 1917 Petrograd was just… it was just a really nice day. It was warm and comfortable after a very long and very cold winter. So it’s weird to go through all these and then write down that the trigger for the 1917 revolution was just that it was a nice day, but that’s what happened. It’s why the protests surrounding International Women’s Day were able to roll so seamlessly into demonstrations from the Petrograd Garrison. It was so nice! Everybody wanted to be outside. History, man it’s crazy.
So these triggers all come in many shapes and sizes, but what nearly all of them have in common is that the sovereign made some kind of final, provocative move — this isn’t true of all of them, but it’s true of most of them. The trigger that triggers revolution is almost always the regime doing something. They try to take our guns, they try to take our rights, they try to take our lives. The initial trigger is pulled by the regime. And the explosion of kinetic revolutionary energy that bursts forth is almost always a defensive response to some kind of perceived threat or provocation.
But what is it that the trigger unleashes? What is the huge difference that comes from one of these triggers that makes the after so much different than the before? And what I would say is that the trigger unleashes popular forces, popular forces that come bursting onto the political scene like the Kool-Aid Man. Whether in the form of crowds or demonstrators or marchers or barricade builders, militias, or full blown organized armies, the political confrontations that have thus far been going on in the political society now have a large mass mobilization element that is uncontrolled and uncontrollable by the prevailing sovereign. That’s what the trigger triggers. That’s when an intractable political crisis becomes a full blown revolution: when the people get in on the action.
Now, no doubt, many of you out there listening have perhaps been surprised by the early centrality that I have placed on ruling class divisions as the vital precursor of revolutions rather than talking about popular upheavals, grassroots pressure, social movements, the kind of things that come from outside the narrow band of the ruling class. These popular forces come with agency and direction and purposes beyond anything the ruling class is interested in, so why not make them the center?
But my read on all these events that we’ve covered is the absent irreconcilable differences inside the ruling classes, those popular forces can’t make a revolution. They can only make a revolt or an insurrection or an uprising. A united ruling class is a very tough nut to crack. Unless that popular energy links with defecting elements from inside the ruling class who have the resources and authority and leverage necessary to actually make the thing happen, this revolt will most likely burn out or be suppressed. Only when the ruling class is divided and when a major faction is ready, willing and able, to ride popular waves rising up in the street, do we get a revolution.
Now, that said, there’s a crucial distinction then to be made the other way: if a breakaway group from inside the ruling class takes power without introducing any popular forces, it’s what? It’s probably just a coup d’etat. So, if popular uprisings without elite support are merely revolts and elite cliques trying to seize power without popular support is merely a coup, then I think that maybe we can sharpen our definition of a political revolution. I said that it was when “the existing structure of political power — how power is exercised, justified, legitimized, defended, and transferred — is displaced by a force originating beyond the bounds of that existing structure, and is replaced by something different.”
I should now add the notion that the force originating beyond the bounds of the existing structure has to have some sort of broad, popular element and some kind of element inside the ruling class. There needs to be a cross -class alliance for it to count as a revolution.
Now, it’s also important to qualify everything I’ve just said by saying that it is not in fact the case that there were no popular forces at work in our various revolutions prior to the final trigger being pulled. It’s not the case that the trigger necessarily brings people out into the street for the first time. Let’s remember here that there was plenty of mob violence and destruction of property in Boston. Carried out pretty routinely in the 1760s and 1770s. Before the Fall of the Bastille, France saw routine grain riots for years, to say nothing of things like the Day of the Tiles and the re own riots. We often see marches and protests and even violent clashes taking place prior to the great revolutionary trigger. What makes the trigger a trigger is that it fuses the interest of that breakaway clique in the ruling class and a popular force now backing them up. They are now pushing in the same direction towards a very irregular solution to their collective political problems.
But the entrance of a popular element does complete the cross-class alliance, I think is so vital to a successful revolution. We now have an armed force populated with individuals ready to fight against the prevailing regime and taking orders not from any institution of the old regime, but from their own new chain of command, which terminates with some pocket of the old ruling class now setting itself up as the new ruling class. The trigger locks into place what is effectively a whole shadow society, featuring everyone from wealthy elites to middle class professionals and intellectuals to artisans and workers and soldiers and peasants. All of them are now linked by a new set of binding ties, often defined by all those new ideas that we talked about, which are now floating around out there. This shadow society is going to try to displace the old society.
Another thing we have to mention when we’re talking about all this stuff is that though a popular force is now present and the people have now entered the picture, that does not mean that the people are a single united entity; nor that popular forces represented anything close to a majority of the inhabitants of whatever kingdom, empire or republic were talking about. The People — capital T capital P — are an invocable political concept, not a description of the sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the population. As you may have noticed, the popular forces unleashed by our various revolutionary triggers are often just a subset of the population of a single major city, like Boston or Paris or Petrograd. And even when the revolution spreads to include other regions and cities and villages, it’s not like the revolutionaries ever make up a true majority of the population. Not only are there plenty of people from rich elites on down to poor peasants who will be ready to uphold and defend the former regime, let’s face it: most people, most places, most of the time, are apolitical. They don’t care. They’re just trying to ride the thing out.
So, the kinetic revolutionary energy unleashed by the trigger, these popular forces, are never actually representative of the people everywhere united. That’s just never going to be a thing that happens. Nor is it even necessary. It’s just that so many of those people are in fact, willing to march out into the streets that the sovereign regime can no longer control events. That’s what we mean by popular forces entering the picture. They have become too big for the regime to control.
And that right there is the rub. That’s the point. That’s the crux of the thing. In the grand scheme of things, I think what’s really going on with these triggers, what they do, when they turn political confrontations in the ruling class into full blown revolutions, is that they open up the great challenge to the sovereign’s last bulwark of power: their preponderance of force. That preponderance of force is what kept everyone and everything in line. It’s what the sovereign has that practically makes it a sovereign, a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Until the revolutionary trigger gets pulled, this preponderance of force is not questioned, however consciously or tacitly, up until that trigger point. It’s taken for granted that the sovereign can deploy coercive physical force far beyond that which can be deployed by any rival or challenger.
But when the trigger is pulled, it breaks the last tie binding those old political arrangements, and it brings popular forces out into the street and sets up a physical contest for power. This is a challenge to the sovereign’s claim to a preponderance of force in the most direct way possible. It’s like challenging the reigning champ to a fight: if you think you are so strong, prove it. And as we’ve seen, our existing ancien regimes, our sovereigns, they’re weak. And incompetent. And ineffective. And it is not at all clear they will be able to prove it.
So next week, we’re gonna move on to the first stage of the actual bonafide revolution. No more disequilibrium or shocks to the system or triggers, but now a raw contest for power pitting a weak ineffectual but still powerful leviathan against a revolutionary force enjoying maximum .revolutionary unity.
Now, if you’ve paid even a little bit of attention in the podcast, you know that that period of maximum revolutionary unity is very fleeting. And never ever outlast the death of leviathan.
But before we go, I just wanna remind everybody that I am coming to Boston, Washington, DC and Newark live and in person on October 26th, 27th and 29th. I just got back from my run through Austin and San Francisco and Seattle, it went great. The shows are super fun and I love being out there. So please get your tickets while you can, and if you’re in Boston, Washington, DC, or Newark, I will see you there.
And if not, I will see you here next week for Appendix Six.