Erik Hauge
Ms. Schock
Anatomy of a Revolution
March 15, 2018
Crane Briton’s Anatomy of a Revolution breaks down and evaluates the different stages in revolutions. Briton breaks down the revolution into four different phase and analyzes them in detail while also talking about what lead to each phase. His book also helped me understand why revolutions happen like the Apartheid in South Africa that happened. I will show that Briton did a good job in breaking down the different stages in his book with examples from his book.
A common component of all revolutions throughout history has been change. Revolutions typically begin because the people want to see change. They become unhappy with the current government, protest, and the revolution begins. Brinton states, “revolutions do grow from seeds sown by men who want change” (86). The causes of revolutions are usually very clear, but the steps the people take to achieve the revolution is not always clear.
Briton describes phase one as the old regime stage as the preliminary stages, like a sickness the symptoms that lead up to the revolution. For example, Briton says on page thirty-two, “French and Russian history are filled with famines, plague, bad harvests were accompanied by rioting, but in each case only won by revolution. When this happened taxation went up and the people of the nations couldn’t pay and were enraged. The author also says on page sixty-five, “governments started favoring one set of economic interests over another.”. this shows that the governments started pursuing one set of ideals over another. The people took notice and started forming their own groups of ideals. Which led to the preliminary stages of revolutions. In The radical phase, the radical people gained power because they are more organized than the conservative old regime. The radicals bring change in political and social aspects of society and they bring on more protests as well. The third phase, the phase of terror begins when the protest become violent and the radicals use military force to get the citizens to believe in their beliefs. The fourth and final phase is the Thermidor phase. The revolution begins to come to an end as the radicals lose their power to the moderates. A strong military leader regains control of the country, as the country begins to focus on political reform and stability.
In the Anatomy of a Revolution, Brinton compares revolutions and fevers. He describes the steps of a revolution as the symptoms of a fever, almost as if it were a bad thing. However these revolutions brought about change, in many cases over throwing a controlling, totalitarian leader. “Politically the revolution ends the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regimes” (239), stated Brinton. Revolutions allow changes within the modernization and efficiencies of countries. Specifically, Brinton describes the French revolution as it modernized France.
The Apartheid in south Africa was a racial revolution between white and black south Africans. During this time the south African government which was mostly white. The government passed laws, for example banning mixed marriages between black and white Africans. They were even forced to move from their homes to segregated communities. Many even lost their south African citizenship when they were moved. Some could even compare this to the civil rights movement in the united states where African Americans were forced to go to different schools, use different bathrooms, they could hold a position of power and they could not vote. But like the civil rights movement had Doctor Martin Luther King to give a monumental speech and unite a nation, The Apartheid had Nelson Mandela. Mandela gave a speech asking for the fighting to stop and to unite and be one nation.
Based on Brinton’s model of revolutions the old regime stage was before and during the state of emergency the safety of the ruling class and whites was superior to those that were black. According to David Penna’s article Apartheid, the law and reform in South Africa “In South Africa, even prior to the state of emergency, such guarantees were relatively meaningless for blacks and often very constrained even for whites. Inlarge part, this is due to the perversion of South African law to serve the interests of a ruling class in maintaining the apartheid system.”