What’s exciting about a revolution? It’s a classic underdog story, plus the overdog is often actually evil. The regime starts with everything: money, power, guns, and land, and yet the plucky revolutionaries manage to overcome these huge obstacles. It’s everything everyone wants out of politics and fiction: the good guys win and the bad lose. Or at least most of the bad guys lose and the good guys win occasionally.
As the astute reader may have noticed, this is a podcast not a book review. Why would I enter this for the book review contest? Aside from Avant Garde ‘hey man anything could be a book’ contrarianism? A) it’s a long form, well researched (nearly 300 sources), detailed history of ten great revolutions, written by actual historian Mike Duncan. B) I loved every minute of it. Duncan took at least 9 years to create this podcast, and it took me at least 3 years to get through the whole shebang.
What is a revolution? What causes one? How do they play out? Is my country heading towards a trainwreck?
The revolutions podcast is split into ten seasons each comprising a full revolution, with supplementals throughout. The colossal run time of the 342 episodes exceeds 190 hours, and the transcript 1.5 million words. For what it’s worth, Duncan recommends starting at season 3, that’s when he claims it starts to form a cohesive whole and gets good. I found all the seasons thoroughly entertaining, but you do you.
Everything in quotes is directly from the podcast. Longer quotes have been lightly edited to change from spoken to written word.
The Listener Experience
Duncan excels in a few areas. For starters, he switches seamlessly between worldviews. An episode will go through the decisions that commanders are going through on opposite sides of a war, and you’ll understand them both. The nobles in King Louis XVI’s court will be angry at his policies, and then somehow, you’ll feel sympathy for said king when he literally falls asleep in front of them. You get a feel for people’s fears and hopes, and how the peasants fear X and hope for Y, and the shopkeepers want literally the opposite.
Not only does he transition between people well, but he also switches scope well too. Duncan switches between huge, world shifting movements, and the actual stories of individual people. He clearly shows the great tides of history, and the fish navigating and shaping it.
Some of the best episodes are those small stories that feed into the big picture. He tells them clearly, with the timing and dry wit of a standup comedian. Listening to Duncan feels like history unfolding before your very ears, with all its nuance, flavor, absurdities, and gravitas.
Some qualms: There’s so much detail that keeping track becomes difficult. After the 10th minor noble or advisor, it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Especially when it’s been a few episodes since someone showed up. All the major players get biographical introductions, but the bit players can be more difficult to distinguish.
This goes for political situations too. He never fails to go down a rabbit hole, and while that’s part of what makes revolutions great, it does stretch the limits of the medium as far as keeping things straight.
And depending on your disposition, you may enjoy or hate the episode length discussions of the political situation in pre-revolution Haiti, or the minutia of early communist party arguments.
Major Plot Arcs of a Revolution
So how does a revolution happen? Well it doesn’t just spring up out of nowhere, here’s some beats that Duncan has observed to be pretty common.
Buildup to Revolution
Before the revolution, there’s a regime. After the revolution, that regime retroactively becomes ancien, French for former or old, not French for ancient.
What do all ancien regimes have in common? No, it’s not tyranny. Tyrants don’t breed revolution, they breed misery. So, what does breed revolution? Incompetence. All ancien regimes are led by a "Great Idiot", who thoroughly bumbles his way into convincing everyone else that the biggest problem in the realm is that he’s in charge of it.
“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’ve 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 rouges gallery of dumbasses to make it happen.”
Aside: yes, it is always a “he”, although behind every great idiot man there’s a great idiot woman. Mary Antoinette and Alexandra Romanov come to mind.
Duncan gets about as angry as historians can get while ranting about these Great Idiots. These rants are some of the most entertaining snippets of the show. You can hear him shaking his head after Louis XVI and family’s escape attempt becomes foiled by an old former servant overcomes Louis’ complete lack of wiles.
Political turmoil always (or at least in these 10) starts in the ruling class. If the ruling elite are all on the same page, then it’s extremely difficult for a popular revolution to occur. But if the elites start infighting, and especially when they bring their considerable resources to bear on this infighting, that leads to political disequilibrium. Then middle and lower classes start noticing this and pick sides.
“Time and again, the door to revolution is first opened by intractable conflict inside the ruling class. From the great English lords challenging King Charles I, to pretty much every member of the Russian court challenging Czar Nicholas, the flood of revolution rises in the headwaters of the ruling class.”
This is one of the depressing realities that emerges in Revolutions: revolutions aren’t ground-up grassroots affairs, where everyone collectively decides enough is enough. They start and end with elites in power. They of course require middle- and lower-class participation (without that it’s a coup), but without ruling class division, you just get failed rebellions.
Anyway, infighting happens in the ruling class, which is fairly common and insignificant. Why does it become a revolution? Well, there’s some external shock to the system. There’s a war, or a famine, or the ancien regime realizes its flat broke and needs to raise taxes. Or maybe the French just had a revolution and hey we want one too. A competent leader and unified ruling class would handle these crises. A moron and divided class breeds revolution.
This all leads to…
Revolution Itself
A trigger goes off (sometimes literally). Usually, the ancien regime does something tyrannical, and that causes popular revolt. In America, British troops attempted to seize local munitions, lead to an armed standoff, led to the Shot Heard Round the World. Oddly, there were four other times this same event played out, and only at Lexington and Concord did it spark revolution.
These pivotal moments turn revolutionary potential energy into kinetic energy. Something happens, and all of a sudden all those revolutionaries debating and planning and gathering support and supplies go This is It, and goes out into the streets to protest and build barricades.
One great anecdote: “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.… 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.” It’s wild how often random happenstance changes the currents, as opposed to careful calculated planning.
Now there’s actually a revolution on. It’s not theoretical, it’s happening in the streets, there’s a great struggle for power between the sovereign and his enemies. The hardcore revolutionaries were first to the barricades, and now everyone else has to pick a side. In popular imagination, when a tyrant rules, the only thing keeping the tyrant in power is everyone else’s fear of individual retaliation. It’s a giant multipolar trap where if you choose revolution and so does everyone else, revolution wins handily. But if you choose revolution and only a few others do, or even worse you’re alone, you lose a staring contest with a rifle barrel.
The most famous example of a failed revolution (aka rebellion, you only get to be a revolution if you win) being the Paris Uprising of 1832. As popularized by Les Misérables, a bunch of students rebel and when Paris doesn’t join the fun, they all (spoiler alert) die horribly.
What does unify the revolutionaries? “We know that things like liberty and equality as words and concepts slogans exert a major unifying effect. And these ideas need to be vague enough that universal enough that everyone can feed their specific interest through that abstract slogan. So both the banker and the worker, the landlord and the peasant might say that they are fighting for liberty or equality. While they are talking about very different things. But what I really think brings them all together, really uses them into a single force capable of overthrowing their regime is the fundamental belief that the sovereign is an obstacle”
Then, it’s time for the actual fight over “preponderance of force”. You can’t reform government without literally taking it from the existing regime. It’s time for at best street protests and at worst years of civil war. And oh boy will Duncan tell you about those wars.
Eventually, the revolutionaries overpower the ancien regime, which means it’s time for
Revolutionary Infighting
The revolutionaries defeated the sovereign, their main goal, and only shared goal. Nearly instantly after, the revolutionaries turn to each other, discuss next steps, realize they have wildly different ideas, and then turn on each other.
All the cracks that got papered over now reappear. Inter and intra class conflicts, everything that simmered under the lid of hating the sovereign now bubble over. Conservative elites want order and a better sovereign. Liberal elites want constitutions and reforms. Urban workers want to pay less for bread and to be paid more for their goods. Rural peasants want to be paid more for their bread and to pay less for goods. All the elites want to keep their land. Rural peasants want redistribution. Moscow wants power over all of Russia. Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Georgians want independence. The slogans of the revolution are no longer mere empty phrases, but actual arguments over who gets what. These points are frequently argued with swords and bayonets, not quills.
Of course, these divisions are great oversimplifications: “the interesting thing about all these political and economic and geographic divisions that are going to lead to the entropy of victory is that it's very difficult to map where any single individual is going to wind up on the post-revolutionary ideological spectrum. So some Virginia planters like George Washington and James Madison are gonna become political centralists, whereas other Virginia planters like Patrick Henry and George Mason are gonna become staunch federalists.”
And of course, there’s personal drama: “People sometimes just don't like each other. A lot of Mensheviks became Mensheviks because they didn't like Lenin. Now I took pains during the Russian Revolutionary Series to establish that there are in fact political differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. But a lot of it was personality, not principle.”
These differences don’t stay at the kitchen table. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of types of violence that occur after the ancien regime is ousted:
· Intra-revolutionary civil wars
· Kangaroo court purges
· Kangaroo court counter purges
· Reactionary resurgences leading to more civil wars
· Foreign countries invading to profit amidst the chaos
· Hysterical fear of foreign countries invading, leading to preemptive invasions of said foreign country. These always go terribly unless you have general Napoleon.
· Rebellions by even more hardcore radicals who think the revolution sold out.
· Horrible repression by the new regime
As far as movements to reestablish the ancien regime: “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 martyrdom thanks to an axe or a pistol.”
At any rate, all this happens while the revolutionaries are also trying to take and hold the reins of government.
“Their time and attention is now split. The issue here is that the revolutionary government must serve 2 masters, the Revolution and Leviathan. The former demands liberty, the latter demands order. Now that they oversee the administration of society, this group must see to it that society is well administered. Many of the functions of the former regime need to be maintained in full. Municipal infrastructure, social programs, tax collection, the administration of justice, regulatory agencies, and of course maintaining that the entire military apparatus is still functional. The first generation of revolutionary leaders are now tasked with ensuring all that stays functional. This is an especially difficult task given that if the state was functional, there probably would not have been a revolution. So we are invariably talking about a society whose political and economic systems are frustratingly unsorted, just trying to keep the lights on. They’ll consume an enormous amount of time and energy and take up most of the emotional and psychological bandwidth of our initial revolutionary leaders.”
Surprise surprise, the moderates don’t magically fix everything overnight, which leads to all the top-down violence committed by revolutionaries against
· foreigners unfortunate enough to still be around
· people whose politics differ at all from the regime’s exactly correct ideology
· anyone who has more chickens than their neighbors
· people exactly in agreement with the regime’s politics but insufficiently enthusiastic
· Unsuccessful military officers, who must be in league with foreigners
Basically, evil enemies of the revolution. For every aristocrat or genuinely reactionary (most of them skipped town ages ago), there’s dozens of fellow revolutionaries executed, and for every fellow revolutionary, there’s dozens of commoners. Executions will continue until revolutionary fervor improves.
Eventually things reach a mostly non-violent equilibrium, meaning you’ve entered…
Post Revolution
Who ultimately gains power after a revolution? Answer: The general of the winning army. Since most of these revolutions devolve into civil wars, the winners of those wars look around to figure out what’s next, and naturally start running society.
Often people are kind of alright with this, they’ve been through so much violence, chaos, and general uncertainty that they’re ready for someone to hold the power vacuum and tell them how it’s going to be. Especially because that revolutionary general was often winning lots of battles in their name. In the case of Napoleon, wherever he went for the glory of France he also went for the bank of France. He consistently plundered local governments and brought the money back home.
Here's the short list of post-revolutionary leaders who rose from the military: General Cromwell, General Washington, General Bonaparte, General Louverture, General Bolivar, General Obregón. All local or world-famous executives. All rose from the military in the midst of chaotic civil war and revolution. Many became dictators in some fashion, and many died violently or in disgrace.
The American revolution stands out because Washington peacefully gave up power. That hadn’t really happened before and set a new precedent. (Maybe that’s why they called him president? I’ll show myself out.)
Oliver Cromwell of Britain also refused to become king, but he did name himself Lord Protector for life, which…. Isn’t that different. To be fair that only lasted 5 more years, so maybe he didn’t get the chance to abdicate the lifelong position. Maybe. Washington stepped down, which took the Soviets until Khruschev to accomplish. Simon Bolivar of South America also wanted to step down, but both he and Cromwell found that whenever they tried to give up power, nobody else did things right, and they had to take it right back.
The Mexican revolution is particularly fascinating in this regard, there’s several people who vied for this position: Emiliano Zapata, Poncho Villa, Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, Adolfo de la Huerta, all had regional or national military power and could have stepped into this role had things worked out differently, but nobody gained national level executive power without later ruining their own reputation in a quest for more.
Clearly it’s very difficult to have enough charisma and gain enough power to become a powerful military leader, but still have enough humility and trust in others to actually give it up, especially when nobody expects you to. Or to quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” Replace President with Revolutionary Dictator and that about sums things up. Perhaps Washington gave up power because he genuinely didn’t want the job, and only took it as he was pushed into it, which is a rare occurrence.
Duncan: “Our leaders have come to regard their own judgments and decisions and choices as vital to the health and well-being of their society. That to remove themselves from the situation would be to doom society to a return to chaos. When we look at people like Bolivar and Cromwell basically concluding that ‘everyone around them is doing it wrong and therefore I must remain so that the good and right thing must be done’, you can ask what their motivation is. Because not doing it how I want it done is not necessarily the same as not doing it right, unless you've got a rather large ego. To reach the point where dictatorial power is even a possibility, you have to be something of an egomaniac. Even Washington, with his supernatural aversion to dictatorial power, was an egomaniac. Of course he was. You can't spend any time around the guy and not conclude that, at least compared to a normal person. You don't have the kinds of careers these people have without an unreasonable amount of ambition and an unhealthy level of self-regard. It's very abnormal. And their egos are doing a lot of the work of convincing them that they have to stay in power at all costs. Otherwise it's catastrophic not just for them as individuals, but for society as a whole”
You may have noticed that Lenin and Stalin were not military men. Good point, but they were well aware of this anomaly, and took pain to see that no generals gained a name for themselves. In a classic example of Soviets shooting themselves in the foot, this destroyed their military leadership just in time for WWII. If you’re a charismatic leader, in Soviet Russia politicians overthrow you!
Another depressing point at the end of revolutions: “All of our charismatic authority figures wind up wielding more power and have a greater reach than whatever ruler was in place prior to the revolution. If you look at the military resources and financial resources available to them, the size of the bureaucracy out there doing their bidding, the breadth and depth that they can expect their laws and decrees to be enforced throughout society, we always find a very big jump in the power of the executive.”
The American revolution got going because of a few taxes. The new US government had way more tax authority than the British Crown ever did. Well at least we don’t have a Great Idiot in charge anymore. And maybe that is all worth it, if the new system stops Great Idiots from getting into power, that’s better than before. Fans of enlightened despotism could easily see this podcast as confirmation bias.
Other Takeaways
Here’s some other takeaways that either Duncan explicitly states in the final wrap up or that kept hitting me over the head.
The Atlantic Revolution
“I became fully consumed by the idea that this whole time I’d just been describing one single revolutionary event playing out in different theaters. That there isn’t an American revolution and a French revolution and a Haitian revolution, but one single Atlantic revolution. I simply do not believe things are wildly disconnected anymore. I have a fundamentally holistic understanding of history now.
“Everything is connected to everything else. There are no histories. There is only History, one single thing that never ends.”
“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. Kingdom or Republic or an empire operate in an isolated bubble.”
Duality of the American Revolution
The US often plays the exception to the usual revolutionary rules.
On the plus side, America leads the way in creating a new world order and does it mostly peacefully (after the revolutionary war I mean. There’s negligible intra-revolutionary violence). George Washington becomes Mr. President not King George the first, the US gets a constitution, and the US manages to avoid revolutionary-on-revolutionary violence for decades. Seriously, this is all super shocking compared to the rest of the series. I cannot stress enough how unusual the post-revolution peace is compared to all these other revolutions. It took the United States 87 years for civil war. Imagine an alternative history where the civil war as soon as the articles of confederation break down. General Washington leads the southern army against the North. The North doesn't have the railroad system yet, which hugely helped in the real Civil War. Without that, maybe the south wins, and slavery stays in the USA for far longer.
On the other hand, America kept slavery. Contrast with France, which ended the feudal ties between lord and serf. Contrast this with Haiti: When the rich slaveowners start thinking about independence, everyone under them gets nervous because they look at America as the country ruled by slaveowners.
Washington must have been operating under some sort of cognitive dissonance, clearly he knew slavery to be wrong since he freed his own slaves upon his death. Why couldn’t he free them earlier? It’s a real paradox that’s rippled through American society since.
The US also received aid from France, and failed to pay it forward when Simon Bolivar came knocking to liberate Spanish America.
The Sad State of Haiti
Haiti successfully threw off the yoke of France, becoming the second free state in the western world, and the only successful slave revolt in history. They even provided support to Spanish American revolutionaries, without which South America wouldn’t have won independence. After revolution, they still had the “most profitable piece of real estate in the world.” This all makes the current state of Haiti even sadder, if they had halfway decent leaders instead of what they got they’d be one of the greatest success stories in history.
Revolutions are Rare
For every successful full-blown revolution, there’s many failed civil wars, for every failed civil war there’s many triggers that didn’t spark revolution, for every trigger there’s societal problems, for every societal problem, there’s many bumbling regimes that many people don’t like but don’t overthrow. This rareness adds to the compelling nature of revolutions. From the start, they’re absurdly unlikely to happen.
This also circles back to what qualifies as a revolution. Revolutions occur when multi-class movements get together to overthrow a Great Idiot. When only the ruling class ousts a ruler, that’s a coup. When only the working people hate the ruler, that’s just regular old tyranny and despotism.
Obligatory Conclusion
It’s a great, long time for anyone with any interest in history. Give it a listen.