Revolution and Reaction
John Buchan draws a distinction between political changes brought by violence and those brought by progress.
1923
King George V 1910-1936
John Buchan draws a distinction between political changes brought by violence and those brought by progress.
1923
King George V 1910-1936
John Buchan’s historical research and long experience in Government led him to believe that revolutions achieved little. Political betterment, he argued, comes not from violent overthrow by small, ideologically-driven groups of activists but from the natural wasting away of repression owing to popular dislike.
THERE have been many thousands of revolutions since the world began; nearly all have been the work of minorities, often small minorities; and nearly all, after a shorter or longer period of success, have utterly failed. The French Revolution altered the face of the world, but only when it had ceased to be a revolution and had developed into an absolute monarchy.* So with the various outbreaks of 1848.* So conspicuously with the Russian Revolution of today, which has developed principles the exact opposite of those with which it started.*
The exception proves the rule, as we see in the case of our own English Revolution of 1688.* Properly considered, that was not a revolution, but a reaction.* The revolution had been against the personal and unlimited monarchy of the Stuarts.* In 1688 there was a return to the normal development of English society, which had been violently broken. It may fairly be said that a revolution to be successful must be a reaction — that is, it must be a return to an organic historical sequence, which for some reason or other has been interrupted.
A reference to the coronation of the Emperor Napoleon in 1802, thirteen years after the French Revolution itself, and his subsequent attempt to forge a united Europe governed under his Napoleonic Code.
A wave of revolutions in Europe sometimes dubbed the Spring of Nations, affecting among others France, the German states, the Austrian Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Italian states, Denmark, Wallachia, and Poland. As Buchan indicates, the revolutions themselves were intended as movements for democracy and liberty, but did not achieve their goals; indeed, they provoked an increased State control and fear of liberty (while paying lip-service to it) in the political establishment which has had long-lasting effects.
In the sense that it began (at least in theory) as a repudiation of absolute government, yet in the form of the Soviet Union fell into a despotism worse than the one which it sought to replace.
See The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. King James II abdicated and fled to France rather than fight Parliament’s preferred choice as King and Queen, James’s daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange. William was a grandson of King Charles I, and so also Mary’s cousin.
In 1873, John Bright recalled how, when his friend Richard Cobden was brokering the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty with France in 1860, Napoleon III sighed and said: “It is very difficult in France. In England you make reforms, in France we make revolutions”.
The Civil Wars of 1639-60 were a revolution (or more precisely a military coup) that ultimately achieved nothing but bloodshed and a new absolutism under Cromwell, and a brief return of the old one under James II. In 1688, the country transitioned calmly from absolutism to constitutional monarchy under William III and Mary II.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.