Crane Brinton
1938/1965
Vintage Books
Crane Brinton was an American historian who specialized in the history of France. For decades he taught history at Harvard University, focusing much of his work on the French Revolution. The Anatomy of Revolution, Brinton’s best known work, was first published in 1938 and it was revised in 1965 to include a brief epilogue that profiled recent revolutionary events in America and Europe. The 1965 edition also includes short mentions of recent revolutionary activity in Cuba and elsewhere.
In his work, Brinton examines the components of a successful political revolution. Through an analysis of the English (1642), American (1774), French (1789), and Russian (1917) revolutions, Brinton identifies a set of stages that each revolution moves through. Brinton’s text appears to be partially directed at criticizing commonly held understandings of who creates a revolution and the course one takes. While, for example, there may be an expectation that revolution is to come from an impoverished underclass, Brinton’s examination of history shows otherwise. The author declared that the revolutions are consistently made by a disempowered but wealthy class of people who resent the dominant class. Revolutions then go through successive waves of top-level organization, including a period during which of moderates who attempt to manage government and society in accord with revolutionary ideals, but their weak rule gives way to a period managed by extremists which leads to a period of terror.
Brinton does not find that these revolutions are equivalent to one-another on every stage, for example Brinton strained to identify a ‘terror’ stage in the American revolution. From phase to phase, each of the national revolutions discussed by Brinton shows the characteristic stages he describes in varying levels of definition and/or attenuation. The different stages include its beginnings (with an analysis of who is involved, and of the old regime), the rule of moderates, the rise of extremists, the reign of terror, and ‘Thermidor’, the word for the eleventh month of the French Revolutionary Character. Thermidor is described as the outro of revolution when its fervor settles and new political and social forms rigidify. Some revolutionary goals are compromised during this period. Brinton’s structure for revolutions connotes a possibility that the Thermidor period may provides the ground for new revolutionary sentiments and activity.
Brinton’s text is not intended to be an in depth historical analysis of these critical events, but rather a breakdown of the most profoundly successful revolutions of the modern western world into their component parts. Brinton’s ‘anatomy’ may be understood as a comprehensive description of a revolutionary progression because he described those revolutions that have been confirmed by history as successful. Brinton did not analyze defeated revolution, aborted revolutionary beginnings, or anything resembling subaltern nationalist revolutionary activity. Between the publication of his first and second edition, the struggle to establish the state of Israel found success, as did the revolutions to achieve Cuban and Indian Independence. Perhaps a study of these more recent revolutions may reveal that they, too, follow Brinton’s pattern. Conversely, perhaps these recent events would open up new spaces for addition to Brinton’s structure. Brinton does briefly allude to Cuba and other revolutions in his Epilogue, however he briefly states that these are different, but he suspects they share uniformities with their predecessors. Maybe so.
Brinton’s text is accompanied by a comprehensive bibliography. It is also supplemented by a series of appendices that give bibliographic annotations of important literature pertaining to the revolutions he discussed, so a reader may refer directly to the primary sources of revolution to confirm Brinton’s ‘anatomy’.
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