From Revolt to Revolution

by Jacques Ellul, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

There appear to be two permanent factors in every historical revolt -- the sense of the intolerable, and accusation.

Revolt breaks out, man becomes a rebel, a community revolts when an act, a situation, or a relationship becomes intolerable. It was possible to endure injustice, want, hunger, oppression, and scorn up to a certain point, up to a certain moment; then, suddenly, sometimes as a result of a seemingly insignificant occurrence -- no more significant, at any rate, than any number of others -- the rebel says No. The limit has been reached. Now it is no longer possible to continue in the same direction. "We have fallen into poverty, we are oppressed, we are crushed with labor, we are insulted, we are not looked upon as men, we are treated like slaves who must endure their harsh and wretched lot in silence -- and we have borne all this -- but we are being pressed down relentlessly into the pit of misery ... we are driven to desper- ation, Sire, we have gone beyond the bounds of patience. We have reached that terrible moment when it is better to die than to prolong unbearable suffering." 1

This tragic passage summarizes everything that can possibly be said about revolt. Now the daily pattern of existence has become intolerable. This day-to-day, hand-to-mouth situation cannot continue any longer -- the final drop of water in the brimming glass ... when patience and the capacity to endure suffering have reached their limit. The rebel senses somehow that if the situation continues, he is bound to perish. If he says No, it is not because of any principles or concepts but because he cannot go on living this way. He is simply preserving himself. "He is fighting for the integrity of a part of his being." He is at the edge of despair. Camus is clearly aware of this, at the outset, when he writes "It means that things have gone too far. This far, yes, but no farther. ... There is a point beyond which you shall not go. ... The No affirms the existence of a boundary." But then, unfortunately, he wanders off into arguments which lead him to the conclusion that revolt necessarily implies the feeling of being right. There is impatience only in the etymological sense of the word -- no more than that, I think. Yet this crushing pressure that brings man to raise himself also brings him into history. This No, hurled at a given instant is in fact hurled in history. The details are also part of history. It is not because the British fleet (and, similarly, later the Russians on the Potemkin) mutinied at Spithead in 1797 "owing to bad food and to inadequate leaves"; that this event is without current significance. Today it is the practice among intellectuals, imbued as they are with Leninism, to minimize revolt and to conceive of revolution in different terms -- majestic and profound. "In order to be able to reconstruct and to mold history in its own image, the revolutionary plan must begin by integrating and interpreting it completely; popular revolt is indifferent to history and breaks out only in response to a daily existence that has become intolerable the lack of this basic dimension is what differentiates it ... from the revolutionary plan." 2 In any event, it is not because the rebel has no theoretical understanding of class relations or no broad conception of history, etc., that he is somewhat removed from the latter. I would readily say that the capacity to integrate history dehumanizes revolution altogether, and that the popular upheaval of revolt remains the expression of humanity. Not of metaphysical man but of man in his history. And what appears to me to bear out this reality is in fact the perpetual affirmation of it. "Things can no longer go on this way," in other words, a point has been reached beyond the two basic drives mentioned above man revolts because the "no longer" is now the impossible. But it has nothing to do with feeling.

From now on there is no purpose in seeking an explanation of the revolt or a reason for the ringleader's or the rebel's attitude. Countless volumes on the life of Spartacus or of Saint-Just, with all their attempted psychological nuances, testify to the futility of the search. And the failure of Thomas Munzer by Bloch and of the very recent Nat Turner by Styron 3 reveals the limitations, in this area, of both social psychology and psychoanalysis. All these men are enduring the impossible; history has gone along this way but cannot continue to do so. The logic of the situation, the unwieldiness of the machine, and the viscosity of reality clearly anticipate what is going to happen there will be increasing oppression, increasing starvation. And this anticipation based on certainty is what the rebel rejects. He is involved directly in the stream of history. He realizes that he is more wretched today than he was ten yens ago and that things can only get worse. Therefore he regards his history as an inevitable tragedy, as destiny -- and it is out of despair that he says No. No to what? Simply to today's hunger? In fact, to tomorrow's hunger. And this is why revolt is firmly anchored to history; but it is a history that is being rejected!

All too frequently, of course, when we speak of freedom in defining revolt, its meaning is corrupted by our experience of history. For us, freedom has become the grist of philosophy or of political science. Hannah Arendt's book brings out this misunderstanding. But prior to the eighteenth century, freedom had another significance, a directly human one escape from the unbearable, from the design of destiny whose immediate face was the oppressor. So the struggle against the oppressor is only secondary, indirect. Revolution is always constructive it must open the way to exultant tomorrows; revolt is a titanic earth-rending upheaval in the face of an unknowable future. For this reason rebels often are conspirators, sworn comrades. Revolutionaries are not oath-takers. For, as Starobinski aptly expressed it "Through the prime act of oath taking, the individual has accepted the death of his personal existence he has committed himself to an ultimate choice in which man's essence is fulfilled -- freedom, but at the cost of sacrificing everything unessential, namely everything that is not freedom or death." Thus despair is in the very heart of revolt, in its initiation and its development. Revolutions are always acts abounding in hope. Death may occur; it is accidental. In revolt, death is at the very heart of the upheaval. The echo of every revolt "Wherever fear of hunger and fear of prison exist such as we know them, there is no room for fear of hell," one of the Ciompi ringleaders in Florence said. This bears out Emmanuel Mounier's statement on the risk involved in every revolt "The joy of sacrifice and the perilous exaltation of death resides in them. Death is a ready answer that absolves one from seeking other answers." How often, in fact, has a revolt perhaps collapsed because the rebel, instead of looking for a satisfactory answer, has fixed its price no higher than the death of the first oppressor and his own death. Yet how often, too, was nothing else really possible in the quest for absolute freedom in the face of absolute suffering, as Marx would put it, for a revolt at the start can never sustain, never endure, never exact that which is less than eternal.

This is demonstrated by the numerous Negro slave revolts in the United States, organized by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond (1800), Bole Ferebee (1807), Denmark Vesey (Charleston, 1822), David Walker (1829), Nat Turner (Virginia, 1831) and Charles Deslones (1838). 4 Futile revolts that bewilder us by the intense despair they convey in the single fact that they inevitably lead to the gallows.

In comparison with the fashionable modern doctrines of revolution, the efficient apparatus of Leninists and of others, all of which aspire to interpret history in one way or another, the rebel resembles a poor clod who refuses the history he has already endured and can plainly foresee, which is in store for him, clear as the light of day, tomorrow, as certain as the rising sun. And this is why revolt is at once reactionary and mystical. It is always reactionary in the sense that it rejects its immediate past but favors a former and assuredly more satisfactory past to restore the old order of things and thereby ease the people's burden. 5 "A return to the old customs. ... They are willing to pay the customary old taxes. ... They are content to have a king who rules according to custom." "What is needed is a return to the good times of the States," said the French rebels of the seventeenth century, but the Russian rebels expressed it no differently they wanted a true czar, one who would restore the ancient rights of the peasants? And in the sixteenth century there was the same problem the German peasants rose "in order that things might be restored to exactly the same state they once were in when men were still free." 6 Similarly, in the Middle Ages, the revolt of the Goliards, although it might appear to involve all of society, turned out to be just as conformist and reactionary! Does this mean that it was not historical? We think of history only as forward movement. For the people of that era, history was a return to good times. Truth was to be found in the past. There was no refusal to move forward, simply the desire to approach a restoration of times when men had been free and had had enough to eat. They had to abolish the inexorable degradation of their condition. What was intolerable, finally, was to float with the current. The normal flow of history had to be altered.

Yet, by the same token, there is almost always a mystical element associated with this denial, for no one sees how to alter the normal course of this ill-fated adventure. One surprising question always remains when we study detailed descriptions of hundreds of these revolts what did these peasants imagine when they rose in rebellion, hanged a tax-collector, put a chateau to the torch, or raided a caravan? Driven to desperation, they rose -- and then what? We eventually learn that the revolt actually achieved nothing. But what could they really hope to gain? Did they not know that every rebellion, no matter where it occurs, inevitably meets with repression and every rebel with massacre or execution? And when a small victory is theirs, this band of insurgents suddenly falters, unable to proceed. The scholar will say "They lacked a doctrine ..." Agreed. This very fact made them rebels, against a destiny whose course they were trying to change, but without a plan for changing it. And because they rejected any further advance of history along the lines that their daily experience taught them to expect, they could not conceive of any tomorrow at all revolt has no future, because this future can only be an aggravation of the present, and rebels are done with the present. This explains their passivity when revolt is temporarily gaining ground or when it is collapsing. Either instance simply demonstrates the inability to create a future. But it also explains the mysticism that accompanies nearly every rebellion. There is no logical future, no conceivable positive transformation of the present, so one makes the leap to the end of time -- a visualization of the ultimate future, of a society which has no community with the one being refused, and which is frequently a recovery of the ultimate and also visualized past. That blissful past before the fall. Revolt marches toward the Advent; it is a visionary quest for a totally free and equalitarian society, the kingdom of the millennium, the restoration around Christ's tomb of the perfect society of the poor, the revolt of John of Leyden or of Munzer and the peasants, Joachim de Flore's rebellion, revolutio temporis returning to the restitutio omnium, the eschatological reversion of all things to their pristine perfection," the revolt of the Nu-pieds in Normandy and of the "army of suffering" that sought to implement literally the equalitarian communism of the Acts of the Apostles. And Metraux observes the same characteristic in the revolt of the Indian masses "The Empire of the Incas shall be restored and gladness shall reign once more throughout New Peru." It would be wrong to assume at this point that any sort of fulfillment of history is occurring we are in the realm of myth, of projection into a mythical age discovered spontaneously in the utmost suffering of the human heart. In his intense despair, the rebel responds simultaneously by rebelling and by casting himself into the myth.

Only a sense of greatness far surpassing human actions can compensate for the experience of reality and for an act deriving from absolute necessity, yet futile in essence. Thus revolt does not lead anywhere. Camus deludes himself when he counterbalances the absolute No with a Yes. But this is metaphysics. Revolt does not alter historical reality even if the causes of it are perfectly legitimate or if it can provide its own objectives. But as Mousnier points out, "the outcome of a rebellion on the one hand, and its motives and objectives on the other, are different matters." Even when revolt succeeds temporarily, it does not know what to do with victory this is Pancho Villa and Li Tzu Chang (1644), who, having won absolute power, fail to utilize it and collapsed. Rebels never have more than a limited view of the enemy at hand or of the misery that must be overcome, just as they are incapable of uniting regions that revolt simultaneously. Rebels do not see beyond their own terrain (the revolts of Spartacus, of the Jacques, of Munzer, of the Torreben, of Le Gaoule, etc.). And we should bear in mind that because of these characteristics, revolt is definitely not a small-scale revolution, or a near-successful one. These are different categories. "Those peasants were raging savages, not revolutionaries" (Mousnier), "their outburst was not even an attempt at revolution." This also applies precisely to the great rising of the Peruvian Indians, instigated by Tupac Amaru in 1780.

Moreover, revolt may assume broad dimensions; it can [] a country -- and even triumph. Revolt is not necessarily doomed to defeat or extermination; it may on occasion destroy the power and the social structures that incited it. 9 But neither breadth nor victory can make revolt into a revolution. Between the rebellions of Spartacus and of Pancho Villa there is of course the gap separating failure from success, but there is a much closer relationship an explosive adventure launched against an intolerable society, against a future void of hope, and Pancho Villa, as he takes power, soon does not know what to do. He is unable to organize or govern or make decisions. The same contrast exists between revolt and revolution as between the nomad and the man with fixed abode. The nomad can invade cities but then does not know what to do next. So he loots, burns, sacks, and remains a nomad, still camping in tents outside the cities he has just conquered. The rebel sometimes halts at that point where his rebellion is likely to succeed. He stops in the face of an impossible future. He does not know how to create history. There was a consultation before me arrest of Spartacus outside the gates of Rome, which was then defenseless and lay open to him. He had only to take the city. He did not take it -- undoubtedly because of his confused state of mind, a characteristic of all rebels because they are not revolutionists. What would he have done with Rome, he who was only a leader of slave bands? He retreated from the image of power, from the necessity for organizing a society and from the order that he should have reestablished. He had no conception of government or administration. He must have realized this, so he returned to the mountains, letting victory slip from his grasp. His rebellion introduced no new principle into Roman society. But sometimes revolt strikes to the hilt.

And then we find a strange kind of destruction of societies. This is suggested by the Etruscans and the Mayans.

The Etruscan Empire, at the height of its power and before Rome was of consequence, underwent a serious crisis which was to cause its downfall. Neither the war with the Greeks nor even the invasion of the Gauls could have destroyed this power. During the first half of the fifth century B.C., revolts which cannot really be considered social or political broke out in most of the Etruscan cities. Strange revolts, threatening the Etruscan League, inciting conflicts in one city after another, bringing long periods of strife, and with very different regimes and leaders. These revolts succeeded in that they destroyed Etruscan order, federal unity, and economic activity. Successive waves of rebels took control but without ever establishing a new system and a coherent power, and it was amid this general turmoil that the Greeks finally won the war and Rome gained her independence. Revolt culminating in the destruction of Etruria -- but not revolution. No one had sufficient vision to establish a new order, no one was capable of taking the situation in hand. Perhaps the same cause brought about the strange end of the Mayan Empire in 890, with the wholesale abandonment of cities and territories, which was not owing to war, epidemic, or famine. The hypothesis currently held by specialists in this field is precisely that of peasant rebellion against the reigning priesthood -- a rising of peasants weary of forever raising more and more temples, a revolt against "the incredible folly of building that had invaded the priesthood ... a folly that had assumed unbelievable proportions." So the revolt, victorious as it was, was not so much against wealth or power as against an excess of futile and ostentatious labor; it led, in victory, not to a new order but to the abandonment of these cities and temples and, shortly afterward, to the destruction of the Mayan society and its civilization, which was to emigrate. Thus the victorious revolt, obeying no laws but its own, faithful to its sources and to its origins, reached the moment of freedom which was to be rewarded by the death of that society in which it functioned.

There is nothing beyond victory. Victor or vanquished, the rebel moves only toward death. A choice he is unable to express, usually, but which means that for him death has become preferable to life. This unconscious choice, together with the desperate attempt to alter destiny, makes every revolt legitimate. The diversity of immediate motives does not change the profound reality of the sense of legitimacy that resides in the rebel. But the impossibility of the future has important consequences, and related to this is, first of all, the absence of a program. One plunges headfirst into rebellion, without knowing exactly what to do or where to go. There is the present impossibility of continued survival, and one moves in the unpredictable direction of the immediate and rejected past.

In the course of revolt, numerous objectives certainly can appear, and this is indeed one of the characteristics of revolt variability. Rebels hurl themselves at a tax-collector or at the bakeries to obtain bread; then, while the revolt remains self-sustaining for a while, it shifts direction, and temporary leaders propose actions that are always immediate and localized, but diverse. Very often it will get a second wind with the advent of repression demonstrators have been arrested, so the revolt rebounds, demanding their freedom. They are to be tried, so it attempts to disrupt the trial. And occasionally, too, when authority (which is not really threatened) tries to gratify the rebel demands, the revolt lashes back, just after positive measures have been adopted, to demand something totally different. This complete lack of decision is also evidence of the absence of a program and the inability to conceive of a planned and satisfactory future. Moreover, this is why revolt is "anti." It is almost never "pro." But this "anti" (which surges up in the face of a probable evolution) frequently strikes at what we would call progress. It is the result of everything we have already said about revolt and is confirmed by the facts how many revolts have occurred because of, and in opposition to, a phenomenon of progress! We should not forget the periodic rebellions of workers against machines. Those of 1832 are well known, but there were also the revolts of the Ongles bleus (blue fingernails) against the new crafts, the fifteenth-century risings to protest the silk machines, the English rebellions against the spinning jenny, the revolts of the Rhone workers against the first steamboat. Inventions of the devil or fear of unemployment in each of these cases, revolt was aimed at what we consider the symbol of progress. And we should probably include among reactionary revolts all those that arose in protest over crown taxes, the new tax during the Middle Ages. The fiscal policies of the crown during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries incited mass risings all over Europe, in Burgundy as well as in Scandinavia, in Beauvais just as in Flanders, in England, and in Aragon. But the opposition stemmed not so much from the burden of the tax as from its novelty the presence of the king's agents, who were strangers. Revolt is rejection of a centralizing and remote power.

An expression of backward attitudes, or lack of education, perhaps; nevertheless revolt is there. Similarly, the rebellions of the seventeenth century were motivated to a great extent by the growth of the state -- by its development, its administrative improvements, and expanded functions; but this growth entailed spending, and in the people's eyes the spending was wasteful. They could no more understand administrative necessity or centralization than they could the necessity of machines. "We are dealing with a retrograde and particularist political movement directed against the development of the modern absolute state with its centralizing and consolidating functions" (but, on the other hand, Mousnier adds there is no trace of a social program), and this was true in France (the Nu-pieds) as well as in Russia, with Stenka Razin opposed to centralization and efforts to organize an administrative bureaucracy, and in China under the last of the Mings.

Similarly, Le Gaoule rose against the arrival of administrators responsible for establishing order out of the confusion in Martinique that followed Louis XIV's death. The administrators sought to rationalize the socioeconomic system, to integrate the economy, and to normalize the relations of power they were regarded as disruptors of society in the service of me state, and this at once incited the reactionary rebellion. We should also bear in mind that the premises of the French Revolution were initially a reaction against a state seeking to improve itself the famous struggle of the parlements against power constituted a defense of bourgeois privilege against the progress brought by the monarchy. The entire movement from 1780 to 1789 was one of reactionary revolution. The government effected remarkable reforms in all areas at this time, and its role was the progressive one. But the people refused to follow, bound by their traditional organization, their privileges, and their established situations so power was termed despotic because it sought increasing rationality, even though the reforms it achieved were more liberal.

"Novelties" are intolerable in every country. Revolt is against progress.

The second major pole of revolt, the form of its existence, is accusation. For revolt to occur, there must be a clear and distinct identification of an enemy, of someone responsible for the general misfortune. Accusing someone else, pointing out injustice incarnate in another man, shifting one's own injustice and responsibility onto other shoulders, are essential facets of human nature and of the rebel's nature. This other party must be identifiable, cannot be too remote or too overwhelming. During the stage of accusing "somebody" or "them," revolt does not break out. However, the indignation toward the "somebody" or "them" can create a favorable climate for revolt. The mysterious "they" are blamed for monopolizing grain, for keeping money short, for requisitioning, for judging and condemning. ... But as long as their face remains invisible, there can be no revolt. "They" must suddenly become someone. So an innocent traveler in no way connected with the accusations on the public tongue will suddenly catalyze, because he has misinterpreted some word or misread some scrap of paper, all this rancor and anger; he becomes a marked man, an expiatory victim, a scapegoat for the misfortunes of everyone." This overwhelming misery and ruin must come from someone. Endured as a destiny we said, it is true, but a destiny for which someone is responsible. Pin the blame somewhere, preferably on whoever is closest at hand. Revolt cannot be appeased either by sociological analyses or by abstract objects held accountable for deprivation (the state), or by persons so remote that they are mythical (the king), or by groups that are more or less fluid (a class, for instance).

Revolt lives in the immediate present, and it is here that the responsible person must be found; the accusation falls upon the man who is here. Just as the rebel sees the apocalypse on his horizon, in the movement that hurls him along, so his accusation takes a concrete form. The enemy, source of his grief, is bound to be at hand, within striking distance. For this enemy is indeed a scapegoat who must be sacrificed and must suffer for the sins of the people. And, in the end, the enemy massacred by the rebel, though flesh and blood, is no doubt the symbol of all and every execration. The fundamental act of accusing someone whose face is known involves three principle signs. We have said that the phenomenon of revolt is closely linked to the phenomenon of the state (without there being any allencompassing relationship), and this applies to Western Europe as well as to Russia or even China. Whether it is a modern state in the process of establishing itself, with its authority bearing down relentlessly, whether it is an oppressive, tyrannical state attempting to expand its sway over free peoples ("the period of strife in Russia was fundamentally caused by the development of the state"), or whether it is a well- organized state, as in China, but one whose excessive organization loosens its hold on reality and leaves it unable to control the economic and social world -- what happens then is what we might call a crisis of the state that begets rebellion ("actions on the part of the state much more than social conflicts appear to be the motive for revolts"). Moreover, the state in China and in Russia seems to generate social conflicts in the period under discussion (the seventeenth century). "The revolts during the seventeenth century in France, Russia, and China were reactions against the state" (Mousnier). This thesis is strongly supported by a historical analysis which I find indisputable. And I could apply it generally to many other periods of revolt without, of course, universalizing it. In the final analysis, the important point here is the following the state is an abstraction. And if this is the true core of revolt, the crux of the problem, the rebel, owing to his need for a scapegoat, cannot react to it in this form. He then attacks the agents of the state -- the one nearest at hand and, hence, the most despised. The servant of government becomes the very face of the state. Though he be merely a modest administrator, usually at a rather low level, he is the incarnation of everything hated, the immediate experience, all the rest of which is mere abstraction. The army recruiter, the tax-collector, the provost, and the bailiff are the ones who will fall to the desperate wrath of the people. It has to be an individual. There is no such thing as revolt endured against an abstract state. And this is also why, traditionally, in the course of revolt the king or czar does not come under attack he is much too remote and abstract. He is not a human being. This issue does not exist for the rebel.

Excerpt from Autopsy of Revolution, By Jacques Ellul, Alfred A. Knopf, 1971. Translated from the French by Patricia Wolf. (no relation)


Footnotes:

1 The workers of A Petersburg petitioning the czar in January 1905; quoted by Decoufle, Sociologie des revolutions, 1968, P. 29.

2 Decoufle, op. cit.

3 E. Bloch, Thomas Munzer, Fr. edn., 1-966; William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, 1968.

4 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 1526-1860, 1958.

5 These statements and numerous others are taken from the remarkable book by R. Mousnier, Fureurs paysannes, 1967.

6 E. Bloch, Thomas Munzer, theologien de la revolution.

7 Vexliard, Introduction a la sociologie du vagabondage, 1956.

8 Revolutionary messianism, outside the Western hemisphere, has been soled in detail (dealing with all the themes of revolt we mention here) by M. I. Pereira de Queiroz, "L'Homme et la Societe," Mouvements messianiques dans quelques tribus sud-americains, 1968.

9 Petit Jean, Le Gaoule, revolte de la Martinique en 1717, 1966.

10 What I say is in no sense imaginary; it happens frequently in every revolt -- for example, the massacre of Poupine at the start of the Nu-pieds rebellion.