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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.
Appendix 8: Wars, Both Foreign and Domestic
Last time we discussed a nearly universal characteristic that follows any successful revolution, and that’s the entropy of victory. Today we’re gonna talk about another near universal characteristic that follows a successful revolution, and that is war.
Now we know that in normal times, war is the continuation of politics by other means. This goes double in a revolutionary moment, when all the old rules and norms and laws of politics have collapsed anyway. Violence has already entered the picture as a viable and justifiable means to political ends, so it’s not much of a leap for a full blown war to break out as a direct consequence of the revolution. So what we’re gonna do today is break down the types and categories of revolutionary wars, both civil and international, because though war itself may be a constant, the particulars depend very much on time, place, and circumstance.
Now, first, let’s talk about domestic wars — civil wars. One thing that became very clear to me in making this podcast is that all revolutions are civil wars. It is always and everywhere the case in a revolution that at least two sides are contesting sovereign power using force. The preponderance of force stage of the revolution is by its very nature a civil war. Now, this is true whether it’s armies on a battlefield or street fighting around barricades. So technically, civil war has already entered the picture thanks to the contest over the preponderance of force, but we’ve already talked about that. What we’re here to talk about today are the kinds of conflicts that happen after that phase. Whether that phase took three days, or three years, or three decades, it resulted in revolutionary victory. And what happens after revolutionary victory is what we’re here to talk about.
Now, there are two broad categories of civil war that follow revolutionary victory. One is wars between revolutionary factions, now that the entropy of victory has broken their unity. The other kind is wars between the revolutionary regime and some restorationist group fighting to bring back the ancien regime. Typically, these two types of civil war are gonna be happening simultaneously, driving into each other and freeing off of each other, because we would hate for anything to be simple and uncomplicated.
Now, to take the second of these types first, in any post-revolutionary moment, we invariably find a rump force still loyal to the old regime, that’s ready to organize an armed struggle to reclaim sovereignty from the revolutionaries. This is often considered a realistic goal because of the growing disunity of those revolutionaries. Like we may have been defeated, but now look at them squabbling and backstabbing. We can regroup and stage a comeback.
Now, in the early going, the goal of this group will often be the literal restoration of the ousted sovereign: the aim of putting King Charles I, or King Louis XVI, or Tsar Nicholas II back on their rightful throne. But problematically, if a sovereign has been overthrown by a revolution, it’s often because their appeal as individuals has become, you know, rather limited. When the Russian Whites were initially trying to get organized, hey, we’re trying to bring back Nicholas and Alexandra was not much of a sales pitch. So what I’ve observed about these counter-revolutionary restorationist movements is that they start growing in size and strength and potency once they become more about restoring the former regime generally and less about restoring the former sovereign specifically. The royalist restoration in Britain succeeded when it represented the institutions of a royal dynasty rather than Charles I, the individual human. The Royal and Catholic armies in Vendée were trying to restore the monarchy after Louis the 16th got his head chopped off, but not Louis the 16th — he had gotten his head chopped off. And then ultimately, what Russian White leaders like Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin started doing was trumpeting the restoration of the Russian Empire, one and Indivisible, but not necessarily Nicholas and Alexandra. It was actually somewhat helpful when the revolutionaries dispatched these various problematic sovereigns because the restorationists were free to pursue the idea of the old regime, the overthrown ruler themselves safely relegated to permanent martyrdom, thanks to an ax, a guillotine, or a pistol.
Now there’s always gonna be a faction committed to the restoration of the old regime, but it’s not the case that this faction is always going to become strong enough to wage some kind of counter-revolutionary civil war against the new revolutionary regime. There were, of course, Bourbon legitimate who organized after 1830, but they never had the size or the strength necessarily to challenge the July Monarchy. Then after 1848, there were Legitimists and Orléanists running around, but they didn’t have the juice to challenge the Second Empire. And then after 1871, there were Legitimists and Orléanists and Bonapartists, none of them commanding enough support on their own to wrest control of the state from the others, and so they all fell into an unhappy business partnership that we call the Third Republic. So there are always gonna be die hard diagnostic claims and supporters, but those claims and supporters no longer capture wide attention or interest.
The same was true ultimately of diehard Porfirians in Mexico. There was a faction that kind of rallied to Felix Diaz, but it was insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The groups that fought for control of Mexico after 1910 mostly moved on from the Porphyrian dynasty. So while there is always some restorationists faction in play, they are not going to define what form revolutionary civil war takes.
That leaves the other type of civil, the one that stems directly from the entropy of victory. This is revolutionary on revolutionary violence. Intra-revolutionary conflict can break out along any of the lines of discord we talked about in Appendix Seven: socioeconomic class, geographic regionalism, political ideology, religious belief, straight up personal conflict. We’ve seen these types of civil war break out all over the place in the podcast: fighting between Bolsheviks, SRs, and anarchists, the Mountain versus the Gerondins, fighting between liberals and socialists, between centralists and federalists, republicans and constitutional monarchists. If we look at the United States after Yorktown, things like Shea’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion can be framed as at least civil war-ish conflicts between two wings of the victorious revolutionaries along socioeconomic and regional lines. To wit, rural western farmers against the eastern commercial elites.
Now, in some cases, the Civil war side of the equation seems to overawe the revolutionary side. Revisionist historians think the Civil War aspects of the English Revolution were so pronounced that they want to call the whole period the English Civil Wars. The Haitian Revolution had lots of intra-revolutionary conflict culminating especially with the War of Knives between Louverture and Rigaud, which broke down along regional and ethnic lines. And then so much of post independent Spanish America was defined by competing caudillos, these conflicts often being less about ideology and more about regional factionalism. This was a pattern that held all the way through the Mexican Revolution, which, not unlike the English Revolution, is often recast as merely a civil war with barely any revolutionary content to speak of, it was just powerful leaders vying for the throne. Now, I personally think it was much more than that, but one could frame it that way.
Now I can only speak of the revolutions that we’ve covered, but it seems clear that even setting aside the preponderance of force phase of the conflict, all revolutions will involve a further civil war of some kind or another. And it is usually a mix of the two types that we just talked about, where disunity and fighting among the revolutionary groups allows restorationists groups to spy an opportunity to strike, creating multi-front and multi-factional conflicts where it’s often not clear who’s fighting who and who is on whose side. This certainly describes the situation in the French Revolution after about 1792 and the Russian Revolution after 1917, where there were simultaneously strong restorationist forces in the field and intensely bitter conflicts amongst the revolutionaries themselves.
But were civil wars, the only types of wars consuming the French Revolution and Russian Revolution, or any of the other revolutions? Oh, good gracious, no. That would make things far too simple. Because revolutions are also always at the doorstep of a foreign war. One of the other big takeaways from all my reading about all these revolutions is that the international dimension is vital to understanding the revolution’s trajectory. No revolution unfolds in an isolated bubble. That is because no polity on earth, be it a city state, or a kingdom, or a republic, or an empire, operates in an isolated bubble. We are always connected beyond the territorial bounds of our societies. When something is tumultuous and destabilizing as a revolution breaks out, foreign neighbors are going to get dragged into it one way or the other. Cash, weapons, supplies, soldiers, and diplomats start crossing borders in both directions, as all the interested parties in the revolution seek aid and comfort from various foreign powers, and those foreign powers look to increase their influence and interest inside the polity undergoing the revolution. Now, sometimes this stops short of full blown declarations of war, and unfolds instead as proxy conflicts within the context of the inevitable civil wars. But other times, domestic revolution leads directly to international war.
Now, there is something of a prevailing myth out there that the most common type of international war will break out when neighboring powers fear the spread of radical ideas, and invade and crush the revolution to restore the ancien regime. One imagines an ousted sovereign turning up in a neighboring court begging for help, and the sympathetic neighbor saying, ah, yes, we must raise troops to put down the revolution before it spreads. Now don’t get me wrong, this does happen sometimes — the Russians sometimes march into Hungary — but usually it’s not that way at all. The great powers of Europe eventually concluded the first French Republic was an intolerable menace that had to be destroyed, but that’s not how the war started. Indeed, almost nowhere do we find international powers mobilizing for war primarily on restorationists grounds; not in the English Revolution nor the American Revolution, French Revolution, Haitian Revolution, Spanish American Independence, not in 1830 or 1848 or 1870, not in Mexico or in Russia.
Now these kinds of things can happen — France did after all invade Spain in the early 1820s with the express purpose of overthrowing the liberal regime and restoring Bourbon absolutism — but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. I mean, even after the Allies had been at war with France for 23 years, they still found themselves without a clear answer of who should follow Napoleon in 1814 and 1815, because the allies did not agree amongst themselves that it was a war aim to restore the Bourbons to power.
Now what more typically draws neighbors into a war is not their solidarity with the ousted monarch, who could after all, easily be a long despised rival who they were happy to watch burn, but instead their interests in the neighbor’s resources, strength, and general disposition. Probably, they’ve had local clients who were always happy to orient trade and diplomatic relations in the foreign patron’s direction, and now that the regime has broken down completely they want to back factions most inclined to support their interests. This is what happened in the Mexican Revolution, where the United States, with all its banks and guns decided to be the king maker of Mexico. They constantly shifted their support. First Villa was great, and then he was the devil. Madero and Carranza and Obregon came in and out of favor. What the United States wanted more than anything else was hegemonic influence over Mexico, permanent political stability, and commercial profits. They didn’t really care who delivered it.
This also happened in Haiti, which effectively became a battlefield between the British and Spanish and French forces in addition to the local population, because it was the most profitable piece of real estate in the world. And in Russia, you can see how much the Allied occupations of the periphery of the empire and their support for the Whites was less about needing to restore Nicholas and Alexandra to the throne and far more about advancing each country’s political and economic interests in post-revolutionary Russia.
But it is also true that sometimes it’s less about calculation of interests of wealth and power, and instead comes down to the mood and temper of those with the power to make war and peace. This is when individual agency can come into play. Like the big shift in Hapsburg policy in 1792, thanks to the death of Emperor Leopold II, who was staunchly committed to staying out of France and the ascension of his son Francis II, who was ideologically committed to putting down the revolution. So sometimes it’s true that the whims and personality of individual rulers decide things, and this is a big deal, especially for Francis II because he was subsequently emperor until 1835 and never really changed his mind.
Now, as often as not, revolutionary wars are not started by the foreign powers looking to invade or capture or destroy the revolution, but are instead started by the revolutionaries themselves — that is, they are looking to expand and grow their power, which leads to war with their neighbors. The wars of the French Revolution, I think, began when the Jacobins started to push for a war in 1791 and 1792 as like, a character building exercise that would invigorate the nation and push the expansion of this Empire of Liberty they were trying to create. They had dreams of the universal salvation of mankind and wanted to overthrow neighboring regimes to see it done. In the Russian context, the Red Army’s campaigns on their western flank were about expanding the Communist revolution to Germany and beyond. Now, in the case of their conflict with Poland, well, Poland had its own expansionist dreams that ran them right into Russian expansionist dreams, so it’s not like the Polish Soviet War was entirely about Bolshevik dreams of worldwide socialist revolution, but that did have a lot to do with it. There was a reason they were trying to march on Warsaw, and that was to create a bridge to Germany. And many observers saw the battle of Warsaw explicitly in terms of a battle between capitalism and communism, with the result being the miraculous salvation of capitalism from the invading communists.
Now, there are course also international wars where the neighboring country or foreign power is not at all opposed to the idea of revolution at all. Sometimes the regime is positively giddy at the idea that a revolution has broken out somewhere in a neighbor’s territory because of the wonderful opportunities it affords. The prototypical example of this is France deciding to support British North America in their rebellion against crown and Parliament; it was certainly a wonderful opportunity to stick it to the British. Simone Bolivar tried to get the United States to play a similar role in the struggles for Spanish American Independence, but was rejected. It took support from a different neighboring power, the Free Republic of Haiti, the second free and independent nation in the western hemisphere, that got him back on track. And during the Russian Revolution, Russia itself was blockaded, but after the founding of the ComIntern, the Russians flipped all of this, and they became the patrons of revolutions in other countries. They were always willing to play the role of banker or arms dealer and safe haven for communist revolutionaries abroad.
Now, one sort of exception I do want to talk about here is the Revolution of 1830, which was not followed by an international conflict. And we might simply say, oh, well yeah, well, not much changed, so there was no reason for a war, but it was a fear of international war that was one of the main selling points of Louis Philippe; certainly it’s what earned him Lafayette’s support. Because there would have been a war if the result of the July Days fighting had either been the declaration of another French Republic or the elevation of a bone apart to the throne. The words republique and Bonaparte meant only war, and it is very unlikely that in 1830 the other great powers of Europe would’ve allowed either a republic or a Bonapartist restoration without a fight. And so, the French swapped one Bourbon for another, and then made it very clear in their first communications with all the other foreign offices of Europe, we are not a threat to you, we mean you no harm.
So what all of these wars mean, whether they are foreign wars or civil wars, is that a revolutionary epoch is a militarized epoch. Nearly all the revolutions we’ve talked about involve military mobilization on a scale that far exceeded the military mobilizations of the ancien regime. From the creation of the New Model Army to the creation of the Continental Army, the levée en masse, the Red Army, the various armies of the Mexican Revolution and Spanish American independence and the Haitian Revolution, we have tons of people either volunteering to serve in the ranks, or conscripted into service. In all of these places, the number of people under arms dramatically increased, and the hearts and minds of tons and tons of people were stamped by military service, with the drilling and the orders, the battles, the blood, the boredom, the losses, the courage, the victories, all of it. The shared experience of war marks the revolutionary generation.
And one of the effects of this is that military service has always afforded an opportunity for upward mobility. The army and the navy have always had room for talented recruits and opportunities for young men to advance up the social ladder, and in a revolutionary war, these opportunities are everywhere. People can come from nowhere and become something. This is especially true in a situation where the martial aspects of the revolution increase, and so the social and political authority of military officers increases beyond their mere military authority. This upward churn creates leaders and heroes and, at the very top, opportunities for commanders in chief to lead the whole nation. Napoleon is obviously the most famous example of this, but George Washington went from merely being a prominent Virginia planter to being, like, god of America. Simone Bolivar did it in South America, Obregon did it in Mexico. If wars are everywhere, soldiers will become your leaders.
But all these civil wars and foreign wars requires bodies to be sacrificed, and so what we often find amongst the lower classes is an initial burst of enthusiasm and volunteering giving way to hostility to ongoing conscription. This then becomes a major driver of resentment and backlash against the revolutionary regime. Husbands and brothers and sons, and fathers being hauled off to go kill or die in a war they don’t really wanna fight in. Obviously in the French Revolution, the Vendée uprising is explicitly an uprising against conscription. Throughout the old Russian Empire, every side engaged in impressment and conscription of one kind or another, which provoked local resistance whenever and wherever it happened. Dodging the draft, whoever’s draft it was, became a cause for local celebration of the sly foxes who kept clear of the recruitment officers. It created enormous amounts of resentment and it created distrust between the people and their governments.
Now, going alongside this resentment over conscription is resentment over requisitions, where armies operating in theaters are simply plundering the local population in order to keep the war machine going. These requisitions at bayonet point often seem very anathema to the idea of liberation and emancipation and utopian prosperity that the revolution was supposed to be about. Instead, people wearing revolutionary cockades or stars on their hat come around telling you you have to give them all your chickens. With civil wars and foreign wars erupting all over the place, the common people always have to endure crisscrossing armies conscripting and requisitioning and then occasionally running into each other in huge battles that cause enormous pain, suffering, and destruction wherever they break out. And this is a huge part of the explanation for why revolutions break out with so much hope and optimism, and often sink into so much cynicism and pessimism.
Warmaking also has a profound effect on the course of the revolution. With existential emergencies constantly coursing through the revolution, the new regime has to deal with every single one of them. And as they attempt to win whatever war it happens to be fighting, they’re often led to take draconian measures implemented for the salvation of the revolution. And if the government is not doing enough, if they seem to be losing the war, this presents a path for radical challenges to that regime. Radicals can demand sterner measures and more clear eyed leadership. They can say that victory alone ensures survival, that this is no time to hem and haw and have a heart.
So next week, we’ll get to the stage in the revolution I’m sure you all knew was coming eventually: the radicalization of the revolution, when many of those who started the revolution are now suspected of being weak-willed traitors who can no longer be trusted with power. And with so much at stake, how can we possibly allow them to remain in power even one day longer?