Understanding bourgeois revolutions

[Stirnerian]

There are three major bourgeois revolutions within the context of Western capitalist society that are available for reference in an analytical framework:

1. The American Revolution
2. The French Revolution
3. The American Civil War

These are the purest examples of bourgeois revolutions we have from Western history (I'm not well-educated enough to speak to the experiences of other areas of the globe).

The first and third can largely be seen as an interrupted revolution, with an antebellum interregnun of eighty years or so. The French Revolution is probably the 'purest' of the three, having accomplished its major revolutionary objectives within itself.

There were other revolutionary upheavals in the general period, but I find it difficult to describe them as 'revolutionary' in the Marxist sense of a class displacement event - the German Revolution of 1848, for example, had little effect on the economic remnants of the feudal structure in Germany (e.g. the survival of the Junker estates in Prussia, whose dominance of the agricultural economy of that state would remain unchanged into the twentieth century).

So taking as our subject these 'pure' revolutions, I find the following questions worth asking:

1. The picture one often gets is of class lines that are rather firmly drawn between the rising and descending classes. This factor would have been muted in the American Revolution, where there was very little imported British nobility to speak of. But were there French capitalists who sided with the ançien regime, not as Girondins or right-wing Republicans but as royalists? If so, what in their material interests caused them to reject the revolution of their peers?

Likewise, were there Northern American businessmen hostile to Lincoln, the war and emancipation? I can easily imagine that those invested in businesses relying on Southern cotton or tobacco or rice were (perhaps in the New York area, which always tended towards Copperheadism), but I don't know of any examples myself.

2. To what extent were the bourgeoisie class conscious during these revolutions? Were the overwhelming majority of them well-intentioned believers in the liberatory rhetoric surrounding their respective revolutions, or was the obvious class interest in back of most of their minds?

I imagine their class consciousness in 1776 or 1789 would be different in at least the need to appeal to the sans-coulottes etc. as junior partners. Ideally, workers should have no need to appeal to any class outside themselves (though in Russia of course this situation was quite different).

As these are the last successful long-term class displacements we have in history, I'm more apt to look at them as a model than the Russian experience, substituting the various parties in my imagination. Part of our problem may be that there is no King in the same sense as the feudal monarch under capitalism (I don't believe contemporary heads of state are invested with quite the same significance or economic centrality).

[GiantMonkeyMan]

There were other revolutionary upheavals in the general period, but I find it difficult to describe them as 'revolutionary' in the Marxist sense of a class displacement event - the German Revolution of 1848, for example, had little effect on the economic remnants of the feudal structure in Germany (e.g. the survival of the Junker estates in Prussia, whose dominance of the agricultural economy of that state would remain unchanged into the twentieth century).

Not sure how to respond to this. Just because the revolution didn't set up a Republic along the lines of that of the French, doesn't mean it wasn't a revolutionary period for the bourgeoisie across Germany (and elsewhere in Europe). Read Engels' and Marx's Revolution and Counter-Revolution which describe the events, the first few chapters describe the class composition of Germany and their varying interests and intertwined conflicts which would be of interest to you. If the very first sentence of the book describes the period as 'the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe' then why does it exist outside the realm of a 'Marxist' sense of revolution in your understanding?

[Stirnerian]

I ought to clarify:

The German Revolution was certainly "revolutionary" in a commonplace sense, but I have a difficult time seeing where it altered the status of the bourgeoisie vis-a-viz the aristocracy/nobility/Junker class. Poland, on the other hand, saw the final elimination of serfdom in 1848, but the social relations seem more or less in the same status at the end of the Spring Of Nations in Germany as at the beginning of it.

In other words, if there were fundamental changes of the social relations in Germany in 1848, they're obscure enough that I haven't heard of them (which isn't surprising; I'm NO expert on any of this). Poland seems more like the Marxist concept of a social revolution - a change in the predominant social class.

[LionofTepelenë]

Best example I know is the revolutions in South America in the early 1800s, in which the bourgeois creoles revolted against the noble classes in Spain.

[Blake's Baby]

How about the 'English' Civil War (AKA the English Revolution, both really bad titles as they engulfed the whole of the British Isles) which were a 100-year war (from c1640-1746) between the rising power of the bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy represented by the Stuart 'ancien regime'?

[Stirnerian]

Another good example.

Now, this is doubtless an obscure question, but I think it warrants analysis - were there any sectors of the British bourgeois/proto-bourgeois that opposed Cromwell (for reasons other than marriage into or social relations with the royalist nobility)? If so, where did their material interests differ from those of the majority of their class?

[ComradeAllende]

There's also the case of the Haitian Revolution, which borrowed heavily from both the American and the French revolutions (even though technically it was a slave revolt).

[Blake's Baby]

Another good example.

Now, this is doubtless an obscure question, but I think it warrants analysis - were there any sectors of the British bourgeois/proto-bourgeois that opposed Cromwell (for reasons other than marriage into or social relations with the royalist nobility)? If so, where did their material interests differ from those of the majority of their class?

Civil wars don't conform entirely to class analysis. In both the Wars of the Roses (what can justifiably, I think, be regarded as at least an 'English Civil War'), and the Civil War proper, local rivalries were probably as important as class position in determining who was on what side. Most counties or cities probably had a couple of local families that were in constant conflict, who would pick opposite sides in national conflicts (in the North East, it was the Percies and the Nevilles, in Leicestershire it was the Herricks and the Greys - I'd bet most places would have similar patterns of loyalty and enmity).

Bourgeoises can support the monarchy, aristocrats can support the revolutionary bourgeoisie, even if it's against their class interests. Even proletarians can support the bourgeoisie (when it isn't even revolutionary)!