The complex question of when a revolution ends

Donald Sassoon, Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History at Queen Mary University of London, discusses gauging a revolution’s duration.

Donald Sassoon

Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History

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Donald Sassoon

Emeritus Professor of Comparative European History

19 Jul 2021

Key Points

We know when a revolution starts; we are not sure when it ends. It’s always a matter of debate.
Even the exact date of the start of a revolution is sometimes changed afterwards, in order to celebrate on a date that seems significant.
In actual history, people will say ‘the revolution is over’. But those who are not satisfied will say that the true revolution must continue, so it’s difficult to have an end date.

The English Civil War

We know when a revolution starts; we are not sure when it ends. It’s always a matter of debate, and it depends on the definition of what a revolution is. When the English Civil War – the English Revolution – started in 1642, did it end with Cromwell? Certainly not, because Cromwell eventually died and they decided to return to a monarchy – a constitutional monarchy – Parliament’s original demand which was at the origin of the English Civil War.

In a way, one could argue that the English Civil War finishes with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when constitutional limits were set. I would go even further and say it ends in 1714, when Queen Anne dies without heirs. The British Parliament needs an absolute Protestant ruler and, almost like a firm interviewing for jobs, they eventually find that George of Hanover, an ultra-Protestant, will suit. He is called to Britain, and accepts that he has no power. So, that is the end of the British Revolution.

The American Revolution

Strictly speaking, the American Revolution ends in 1783, when the 13 colonies and the Treaty of Paris give them power. But the 13 colonies is not America. America continues. It expands by displacing the Indians. It expands by accepting immigrants as long as they are not Chinese – who were excluded in the 1883 Chinese Exclusion Act – and, above all, it keeps on owning slaves.

African American soldiers in formation at Camp Meade, Pennsylvania, May 1899. African Americans, most from the southern states, volunteered hoping that military service would improve their civil rights. Photo by Everett Collection.

There is a civil war which is really about the unity of the country – whether the south should be allowed to secede from the north. The civil war is the most important war the United States had to face. More Americans were killed than in the First or the Second World War. It ends with the victory of the north, but is that the end of the American Revolution? No, because the period of reconstruction in which Black people were expected to obtain equal rights ended.

So, the American Revolution, one might argue, has only been over since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Some people – supporters of the Black Lives Matter – movement, might say it’s not quite finished.

The French Revolution

We know the French Revolution started on 14 July, 1789. This is actually not true at all. It is a date that was established in 1880 by the Third Republic. They wanted a date on which to celebrate the French Revolution. They could have had a date in June, when the Third Estate was convoked by the king. They could have had the date of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in August. They could have had the day of the birth of the Republic. But in 1880, they thought that 14 July, the seizure of the Bastille, was a safe date. It was not anti-monarchist; The supporters of the monarchy (or just: royalists) were still very strong in the Third Republic, until about 1880.

The Russian Revolution

We think the Russian Revolution started on 7 November 1917, but it started on 8 March 1917, when the demonstration for International Women’s Day led to a massive demonstration against the war, to the Tsar abdicating and then to a long period that was partially resolved on 7 November – which was in October then, because they had the old calendar.

The Bolsheviks took over and it certainly was not finished then. It was only finished when the civil war was finished and the Bolsheviks were in power. Could one say that the Russian Revolution finished in 1921? No, because the objective of the Bolsheviks was to establish a socialist society, which would be completely different from a capitalist society. They went on trying to do that through various techniques, using various plans. In the 1920s, Bukharin wanted the Russian peasants to become rich; they would be the ones who would provide the necessary surplus for the industrialisation of Russia, which had been a problem well before the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Bukharin experiment was never fully tried. Stalin succeeded in creating an accelerated industrialisation, but where Soviet communism failed was in the establishment of a consumer society in which you not only produce lots of steel and electricity, but you also produce goods for the majority of people. So, if we take it into its long-term purpose – the establishment of a good society superior to capitalism – utterly failed.

From communism to capitalism

After 1 October 1949, when the Chinese communists took over, the problem was how do you build a socialist society? The first initiative of Chinese communism was the distribution of land, which is what the peasants wanted, but power became too concentrated in the peasantry. Chinese communism was supposed to give power to the workers, although there were very few of them in China at the time. Mao tried to accelerate industrialization with the Great Leap Forward which resulted in a massive famine. Then a cultural revolution was tried which was also disastrous.

Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Wang Jiaxiang. 1959. Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

When Mao died and his successor, Deng Xiaoping, took power, they started promoting reforms which, to some extent, changed the communist nature of Chinese society into a market economy. One could even say it’s one of the great paradoxes of our present era, that the most developing capitalist society, the one which seems to be the most successful, is actually run by a party which calls itself the Communist Party.

So, there was success in terms of market economy on the Chinese side, but failure on the part of the Bolsheviks and the Russian communists. In both cases, the ideas, the longing, the desires of the original revolution did not come about.

Thinking ahead

When a revolution starts, like any political event, no one knows what is going to happen next, but everyone tries and has got to think that they know what is going to happen next. Otherwise, no one would do anything.

If you take the French Revolution, it starts against the king. It establishes the republic, but it immediately thinks it needs to defend itself against foreign invaders. So, the power of the army increases enormously. A Corsican general, Napoleon, becomes the key figure. He takes over, he establishes a dictatorship, and then he makes himself emperor and fights against the rest of Europe. It’s a failure, and in 1815, according to some people, ‘everything goes back to normal’. But, actually, that’s not true. The restoration is not a real one.

So, everything cannot be forecast, but at the same time, everybody needs to try to forecast what is going to happen next. It’s impossible to exercise any weight in politics unless you gamble a bit, and the people we respect for being great gamblers are those who got it right. Maybe they had more intuition than others. Maybe they were just lucky.

What marks the end of a revolution?

In actual history, people will say, ‘The revolution is over. This is it. We obtained what we wanted.’ But the losers in this, or those who are not satisfied, will say, ‘The revolution must continue’, especially if the word has a positive connotation.

After the French Revolution, the word revolution gave rise to huge expectations. People thought that it was going to be paradise after that. It never is paradise. So, while some people will say ‘We won’, others will say, ’You call this a victory? We are as poor as we were before. We are as anxious as we were before. We are as downtrodden as we were before.’ So, as the French Revolution seems to terminate, you have socialists saying that the true revolution must continue until the bourgeoisie is destroyed.

The thing about history is that every single concept is always challenged, and the challenging of a concept is itself part of history. The task of a historian is to examine not the concept in itself, which I will gladly leave to theoreticians and philosophers, but how the concept is used.

The Arab Spring

It’s interesting to realise that the Arab Spring started because of an event of someone who committed suicide as a protest gesture. Similar events have happened before in history.

11 October 2011. Sana'a Yemen. The Arab Spring or Democracy Spring was a revolutionary wave of both violent and non-violent demonstrations, protests, riots, coups and civil wars in North Africa. Photo by ymphotos.

In Egypt, the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood did not really want change, because they were trying to obtain what they wanted gradually, through reforms. So, they were more or less forced to enter the election. They won the election, but the army and the people who were in the square, who were middle class and who certainly didn’t want a Muslim government went against them.

So, you had what they would regard as a “counter revolution”. Had it been successful, there would have been another Muslim revolution. After all, the word revolution has been used in Iran. The Iranian Revolution and the victory of the ayatollah was against the modernising Shah. It seemed like a revolution to go back in time, but, in fact, they declared it a republic. So, it was a mixed story. If Egypt had had a weaker army and a stronger Muslim movement, they would have been like Iran now.