Appendix 6- Victory And Defeat

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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Appendix 6, Victory and Defeat.

So the revolution has come.

All potential compromises, accommodations, and settlements have been spurned.

All off-ramps have been missed.

Not only has the potential revolutionary revolutionary energy stoked by years of resistance and frustration to the sovereign grown to uncontainable levels, but the trigger has now been pulled, turning all that potential energy into kinetic energy.

Elites are now rushing through palace corridors and hosting feverish meetings in their salons.

Regular people are pouring out into the streets, erecting barricades, tossing pavement stones, blockading neighborhoods, signing up for revolutionary armies.

These are the heady days when no one really knows what happened, what's happening, or what's going to happen.

Will the regime emerge from this chaotic moment dead or alive?

It's nigh impossible to predict.

But as I said last week, one of the main things that the revolutionary trigger does is open the final contest to decide the fate of the regime, whether the sovereign still holds a preponderance of force.

Who wins and who loses this brute force contest?

determines the fate of the regime and the revolution.

Now we know from any game, fight, or sporting match that not only does one side win because of the things the winner did right, their superior talent and strategies and tactics, but also because of the things the loser did wrong, their inferior talent and strategies and tactics.

The narrative of any sporting match can be framed as a story of what the winning side did right, or a story about what the losing side did wrong.

But always, always, always, it's a mix of the two.

So as we discuss this final revolutionary contest, we must talk on the one hand about the superiority of the forces rising up, as well as the inferiority of the forces falling down.

Now on the rising up side, we have what I have variously described as a cross-class alliance, a revolutionary coalition, and a full-blown shadow society.

By that I mean that every socio-economic level, branch, category, whatever, has a revolutionary wing, from the uppermost reaches of the ruling class on down to the lowest peasants and workers.

In between there will be revolutionary lawyers, students, shopkeepers, administrators, merchants, clergy, artists, journalists, clerks, artisans, servants, bankers, professors, all of them springing into action to advance the revolutionary cause in their specific socioeconomic niche.

At the very tippy top of this vast cross-class revolutionary coalition, we might find a dissident member of the royal family ready to replace their cousin on the throne.

They might be surrounded by rich, educated, influential supporters, each of whom are ready to take over the Ministry of Finance or Justice or the Interior.

This then extends on down the line through merchants and businessmen aiming for profitable new arrangements, through middle-class professionals ready to take over the administrative functions of the state, young students and clerks ready to staff those mid-level and lower-level functionaries, on down to workers wanting to force changes in their factories and peasants redefining the terms of land ownership and authority in their home villages.

Now, at every level of this cross-class coalition, people are making risk-reward calculations.

Now, I am not myself a huge proponent of rational choice theory, where people are sitting down and gaming out scenarios and making purely logical choices based off of like mathematical equations.

I don't think humans actually work that way.

But risk-reward calculations are present.

They are doing some of the work.

If you're watching a society advance through all these stages of disequilibrium to shocks to the system and then reach this trigger point, it might still seem like there's a very low likelihood of revolutionary success and no real personal advantage or reward to be won.

This is a high-risk, low-reward scenario.

And in that case, you'll probably sit it out.

But if you look around at your society and decide, hey, there's a good chance of revolutionary success and enormous possible rewards and advantages to be won, This is a low-risk, high-reward scenario, and you might say, yeah, okay, let's go for it.

But this is a calculation that's made by various members of the cross-class coalition, each in their own way, and each for their own reasons.

Because it is not the case that everyone in this coalition has the same interests.

Far from it.

Our proverbial Duc d'Orléans, that royal cousin waiting in the wings, is thinking about how wonderful it will be to sit on the throne, to decide lofty matters of state and play the great game of international diplomacy, to have everyone bow to you while you bow to literally no one.

These are not the same interests as, oh, let's say, a rural peasant, who is mostly interested in getting a little bit more land, or the interests of the urban worker, who's mostly interested in higher wages and cheaper bread, or the interests of middle-class professionals.

often eyeing possible material gains, yes, but mostly interested in gaining access to political power and influence they have likely been denied previously.

They want to participate, to have a real voice in politics.

And when you look at all these interests, they are often quite contradictory.

The members of the breakaway faction of the ruling class want to wield power, not share it with social inferiors.

The land for the peasants, where is it going to come from?

Well, probably from the real estate portfolios of the ruling class families, some of whom might be in that revolutionary coalition.

And there's of course always going to be tension between urban workers who want to to pay less for bread and rural peasants who want to be paid more for their grain.

So if this coalition has such divergent interests and everyone's risk-reward calculation is based on wildly different factors, how are they even united?

Well, I think there are several unifying categories.

There might be geographic ties where we over here see the sovereign as representing them over there.

This is obviously a huge factor in fights over things like independence and national self-determination.

All of those other conflicting interests are papered over by shared geographic proximity or ethnic identity, where the sovereign is seen as a fundamentally foreign object they can all get together to remove.

This can also take on a religious tone, as religious differences often follow geographic and ethnic contours.

so that religious doctrines and belief become binding touchstones for the revolutionary coalition against those heretics over there.

Religious doctrines can also be seen as a subset of one of the major unifying ties, just abstract principles and ideas, which often spring from those new ideas that helped fuel all the political disequilibrium in the first place.

We've talked through so many late 18th century and early 19th century revolutions, we know that things like liberty and equality, as words, as concepts and slogans, exert a major unifying effect.

Now these ideas need to be vague enough and universal enough that everyone can feed their specific interests 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 fuses them into a single force capable of overthrowing the regime, is the fundamental belief that the sovereign is an obstacle.

The sovereign is an obstacle that has to be removed.

Whatever it is you want, liberty, equality, bread, land, power, respect, wealth, the sovereign stands in the way.

It is an obstacle.

This takes us back to those two big things causing equilibrium, resistance and frustration.

The sovereign has either been doing things we hate, or the sovereign has not been doing things we want, and we have all now all of us, each in our own ways, decided that the only option left is removing the sovereign.

People at every ranking class have come to believe that the main thing preventing them from having all the things they want is the sovereign.

It is an obstacle that must be removed.

And everyone agrees on that.

Now, one interesting point I want to make before moving on is that I have not found it to be the case that this initial revolutionary coalition is fused together by a single charismatic leader.

Now I'm speaking specifically here of the first revolutionary wave that rises up and overthrows the Ancien regime.

With one notable exception, the cross-class revolutionary coalition will have leaders, some of them may even enjoy a popular following, but they are invariably just one among many.

First wave revolutionary coalitions have many different leaders, most of whom no one has ever heard of.

The major charismatic leaders who do become unifying revolutionary figures, Cromwell, Washington, Louvature, Bolivar, Cuschut, Lenin.

They make their names after the revolution has started.

They do not make the revolution with their names.

Even someone like Washington, as unifying a charismatic revolutionary leader as we're likely to find, was not the one out there leading the people of New England into armed revolt in 1775.

The people of Massachusetts were not shouting, long live Washington at Lexington and Concord.

They'd probably never even heard of the guy.

Now the notable exception here is the the role Francisco Madero played in the Mexican Revolution.

Not that Madero himself was such a charismatic revolutionary leader that he commanded unrivaled authority in the revolutionary coalition because he really did not.

But given the particulars of the Mexican Revolution, emerging as it did from a rigged presidential election, Madero became a symbol.

His name and face were absolutely a unifying element of the Mexican Revolution.

People were absolutely shouting Viva Madero as they rode off into battle.

so that brings us to the fact that people are now riding out into battle the great physical challenge to the sovereign has been launched the contest over who has a preponderance of force has begun this means that the cross-class revolutionary coalition must be able to produce armed forces capable of taking on the sovereign's armed forces There must be enough willing volunteers to risk not just their socioeconomic position, but to risk their lives.

And by virtue of the very nature of clashes like this, that means that they must come overwhelmingly from that popular force now exploding into the streets, what has been unleashed by the trigger, the popular forces that make the revolution a true revolution.

These armed forces can take several different victorious forms depending on the needs of each revolution.

They can be whole, regularized armies, the New Model Army, the Continental Army, Madero's, Army of the North.

They can be volunteer citizen militia groups, groups, the most famous of these being the French National Guard.

And as we saw, the National Guard was such a decisive force that you could basically predict how a revolution would go based on the loyalty of the National Guard.

There are also semi-organized but mostly irregular forces operating on their own revolutionary initiative, neighborhood groups building barricades and watching out for their own quarter.

This probably also includes political parties who organize inside of existing military structures in the interests of fomenting mutiny and unrest.

We've seen that in groups from the levelers to the Bolsheviks.

And then finally, we have our good old-fashioned, unorganized mobs.

Protesters, demonstrators, and marchers appearing so spontaneously and in such huge numbers that the regime simply cannot contend with them.

The women marching on Versailles in October 1789, the women marching through Petrograd in February 1917.

Whatever form they take, however organized they are, whatever weapons they have, all of these forces serve the same function.

They challenge the sovereign's claim to a preponderance of force.

And that means that they are the force that will make or break the revolution.

It's why the popular element is so important.

No popular element, no force strong enough to openly challenge the regime's forces.

But,

like...

How can the sovereign possibly lose this contest?

They are the sovereign.

They control the army and the navy.

They command the resources of the entire polity.

All existing social hierarchies, economic production, chains of command terminate with them.

Their word is law.

And it's been that way for like decades.

The sovereign's ability to project physical force inside of their polity is quite literally unrivaled.

It's why they're the sovereign.

So how on earth can they possibly lose?

Well, again, first things first, they usually don't.

That's why the the number of failed revolutions and revolts, insurrections, uprisings, rebellions, etc.

far outnumber the successful ones.

But when we come across a very specific set of political, economic, and social circumstances, and those circumstances are presided over by one of our very special great idiots of history, the sovereign can lose, and then does lose.

The reason they lose is that while the ties binding the forces of revolution grow stronger and wider, the ties binding supporters of the sovereign wither and disintegrate.

So, just as the revolutionary cross-class coalition coalesces around a few lofty abstractions and the fundamental belief that the sovereign is a obstacle to peace, land, justice, equality, bread, and or freedom, the corresponding cross-class alliance that has propped up the regime all these years is now breaking apart.

By the time the final trigger is pulled, years of resistance or frustration have already pushed former supporters into the ranks of either the opposition or more probably

the ranks of the apolitical dropouts.

And just as with the revolutionary coalition, I'm talking about people up and down the socio-economic line.

Lawyers, journalists, peasants, workers, bankers, clerks, servants.

A bunch of people who had previously defended the regime and supported the regime, each in their own way, and each in their own niche, now start to passively go quiet.

They start to care a little bit less.

Or they start actively defecting to the revolution.

Once the trigger is pulled, push is truly coming to shove, and the alliance that has long supported the sovereign runs its own risk and reward scenarios to decide what they should do.

And since we are inevitably dealing with a uniquely incompetent, weak, and ineffective sovereign, would-be supporters often fail to see the advantage of continuing to be die-hard supporters, because it means they will likely die.

Hard.

Now, do all of these supporters have the same interests?

No, of course not.

Just as with the revolutionary coalition, they range from a sovereign trying to hold on to the throne, all the power and influence and wealth that comes with it, sitting adjacent to ministers, advisors, and high-ranking officials who are all about to lose their august status.

There are going to be business interests connected to the existing regime who will suffer under a different regime.

But there are also like bakers with a contract to supply a palace, prosecutors who will lose their positions, maybe a customs official who will be replaced.

Even village elders who have a pretty nice plot of land and good standing in the local community might tend to prefer the present sovereign.

There are also other abstractions out there binding them together, things like tradition, duty, obedience.

Maybe religious principles are coming into play that hold supporters together against the rising revolutionary tide.

But here's the problem.

Those binding abstractions and those individual interests are rapidly losing their potency.

And even if that doesn't push them into the revolutionary ranks, it at least pushes them out of active support for the regime.

It makes them willing to shrug their shoulders and acquiesce to the final outcome of the contest without too much fuss one way or the other.

So the moral, economic, and political ties binding together the sovereign's coalition coalition of supporters is unraveling.

But even still, right up to the moment that the trigger is pulled, the sovereign is still a mighty force.

The sheer number of rifles, pistols, swords, cannons, and bayonets they command invariably dwarfs anything the revolutionaries can put into the field.

I mean, look, we're talking about the entire British Army and Royal Navy against whatever the colonials are trying to scramble together.

The French army against protesters roaming angrily around Paris.

The Tsar's combined military forces presently organized to wage a world war against a few malcontents in Petrograd and Moscow?

And this is not even counting yet their police forces, elite bodyguards, secret services, and black hundreds-style reactionary paramilitary groups, all of whom are well-practiced in the bashing of heads.

On paper, the balance of forces is nowhere near balanced.

The sovereign commands so much more.

More men, more weapons, more munitions, more resources, more everything.

So how can this on-paper dominance fail so spectacularly?

Well, it fails thanks to a corrosive trifecta called loss of faith, loss of trust, and the mother of them all, loss of will.

Now remember, the deal here is that the sovereign at the moment is uniquely weak and incompetent.

That's why they're being taken out.

That's why the revolution is going to succeed.

And people inside the regime's armed forces can sense that weakness.

They can sense that incompetence.

And so they begin to lose faith.

This includes those who might, in nearly any other circumstance, support the regime, or who reluctantly still support the regime even though their hearts are not really into it anymore.

So rank-and-file soldiers, non-commissioned officers, senior officers and staff, on up to commanders-in-chief.

They've all been watching political events with growing dismay and disillusionment.

And they are rapidly losing faith in the sovereign.

And I often think here of General Marmont from the Revolution of 1830,

who read the Four Ordinances with shock and dismay and said to a friend, well, I suppose I'm obliged to now go get killed for them.

And then he was in fact ordered to lead the armed repression of Paris, even though he wanted nothing to do with the Four Ordinances and thought it was totally stupid.

He did his duty, and people like General Marmont may be instinctively and temperamentally supportive of the sovereign, but their own mounting exasperation with the sovereign's inability to manage events might start to produce in them this thought.

I'm a professional soldier, loyal to the sovereign of my kingdom or empire or republic, whoever

that may be.

Once senior officers start to lose faith in the individual presently on the throne, and realize that their professional loyalties are merely to the abstract concept of the sovereign, and that they owe their faith and fidelity to that, rather than the present great idiot sitting on the throne, it's pretty bad news for the great idiot presently sitting on the throne.

Now, even if they have not completely lost faith, and they are inclined to defend the present great idiot at all costs, they may yet be doused with another corrosive acid, and that is loss of trust.

And where loss of faith is looking up at the sovereign, loss of trust is looking down at the rank and file.

We've seen this repeatedly over the course of the podcast.

Sure, there are battalions of soldiers mustered under arms and ready to be deployed, but what happens if we actually deploy them?

So many times we've seen loyal officers assessing the morale of their soldiers and reporting back up the chain of command,

if I order them to fire on the people, it's entirely likely they will mutiny and shoot me instead.

It's the men, sir.

They can't be trusted.

And this is often what truly paralyzes the sovereign's ability to deploy their overwhelming force, when they cannot be sure that those forces won't immediately defect.

And this is not theoretical.

We saw it happen a bunch of times where protesting citizens are on one side of a street and soldiers are arrayed against them on the other side of the street, and then they just physically switch sides.

They like literally cross the street.

And if you don't trust your soldiers to stay loyal and kill who you've ordered them to kill, well, it turns out your on-paper strength does not really exist in real life.

And that brings us to the moment of defeat for the sovereign.

And this is when their will disappears.

Now this is not an original idea, this focus on will.

And it's a point I've so often seen and become so attached to that I actually wrote about it in Hero of Two Worlds when I got to the point when the British were going to call it quits after Yorktown and I figure rather than reinvent the wheel I'm just going to quote this paragraph which I wrote to open up chapter 9.

War is a contest of wills.

Weapons, armies, fleets, and fortresses are simply the means by which one breaks the will of their enemy.

A generation hence, Klostwitz would write war has three broad objectives, destroying your enemy's armed forces, occupying their country, and breaking their will to continue the struggle.

But the first two are merely the means by which one achieves the third, the only true goal of war, breaking the enemy's will to continue the struggle.

Victory and defeat are subjective psychological events, not objective material conditions.

If the enemy's will is broken, a million cannons will sit idle.

But if their will is not broken, it does not matter if they are disarmed or occupied.

It does not matter how naked and defenseless they stand.

They will simply kneel down, pick up a rock, and throw it.

And so the final moment of truth comes for our beleaguered and besieged sovereigns, not when all their forces have been wiped out, but when their will to fight on dissolves.

Maybe they are told that thanks to a loss of faith or a loss of trust, further action is impossible.

Maybe they themselves don't want to commit mass murder to stay in power.

Maybe their closest friends and advisors are saying, sire, it's over.

It's time to sign this piece of paper announcing to the world that it's over, That you, the obstacle, are going away.

And even if there are still armies to be deployed, money to be raised, plans to be drawn up, there's simply no more will left to do any of that.

Now, in terms of the revolutions that we have covered, the period between the trigger being pulled and the sovereign's will disappearing can take anywhere from several days to several months to many, many years.

This contest contest over the preponderance of force, that final conflict, goes on for as long as the sovereign can maintain it.

Charles X in 1830 and Louis-Philippe in 1848, they gave up and abdicated the throne in a matter of days.

Tsar Nicholas held out for just over a week, from late February to early March 1917.

Porfirio Diaz waged a war against Madero's army for several months before calling it quits in May of 1911 and sailing into exile.

But in other revolutions, this period takes years and years.

Louis XVI salvaged his position by coming to Paris within days of the fall of the Bastille and saying, yes, yes, I accept it all.

No more fighting.

I am now your citizen king.

But it wasn't until August of 1792 that he really gave up.

The contest between Crown and Parliament and the American colonies lasted from the trigger in April of 1775 to Cornwallis' defeat in October 1781.

And even then, it was several more years before it was clear that hostilities would not resume.

The wars of Spanish-American independence continued off and on for more than a decade before the Spanish sovereign claiming authority over the Americas finally called it quits.

And our old good friend King Charles I of England, Scotland, and Ireland?

Well, he never gave up.

He never acknowledged defeat.

Right until the moment they chopped his head off.

The sovereign finally giving up, losing their will to fight, admitting they have lost the contest over who controls a preponderance of force, marks the victory for the forces of revolution.

It sets off a wave of euphoria up and down the line.

People are ecstatic.

The great obstacle has now been removed.

All their dreams can come true.

Except what happens next?

With the unifying obstacle removed, the conflicting, competing and contradictory interests of all the people in that cross-class revolutionary coalition are exposed for all to see.

And we all know what happens after that.

Say it with me now.

The entropy of victory.

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