Revolutions And Revolutionaries - A J P Taylor

 REVOLUTIONS AND REVOLUTIONARIES -

A J P TAYLOR

Based in part on his 1978 television lectures, Revolution And Revolutionaries is arch historian A J P Taylor explaining to the masses all about the revolutionary tradition. It's all pretty simple stuff, really, with Taylor writing in layman's terms about the points in time when the narrative was disrupted and the world turned upside down even if only for a brief moment before being righted again.

Starting with the French Revolution, Taylor writes 'There have been violent political upheavals as long as there have been political communities: kings have been overthrown, empires have fallen, new dynasties have arisen. But only from the time of the great French Revolution have there been revolutions that sought not merely to change the rulers, but to transform the entire social and political system. The French Revolution originated revolutions in the modern sense and it was not until after it that people knew what revolutions were like. Its events echoed down the corridors of history.'

It's an important point he raises because it seems as if the idea of revolution these days is that of simply replacing one set of rulers for another, or as Crass once put it: 'Just another set of bigots with their rifle sights on me'.

Ah, Crass. Now there's a  name to conjure with. 'Good old Crass,' as one of their critics once opined 'our make believe secret society, our let's pretend passport to perversity,' though personally, I always had a lot of respect for them. I admit, I was never that much enamoured by their slogans such as 'Fight War Not Wars' because - to put it bluntly - I always felt they were re-hashed and oversimplified hippy tropes, but their sentiments and what they were saying as asides and between the lines were sound. In fact, in a way it was the seemingly throwaway lines tucked away in their songs that held more weight than their grand statements. That what they were implying but not actually saying was better than what they were actually saying.

'Can't imagine a revolution could deal with anything so sad,' for example, from Deadhead. Suggesting a lot more than the whole of their better-known track, Bloody Revolutions. Or the random lines at the start of their A Series Of Shock Slogans booklet: 'Waiter, I came in here for breakfast, you haven't served me yet and now it's lunchtime, perhaps I could order supper?' The point of and the reason for putting the lines there being left for the reader to decide.

But I digress. The point being that a revolution doesn't just mean the chopping-off of the king's head or the deposing of one tyrant only to be replaced by another. Revolution means total revolution from top to bottom. 

A J P Taylor was a serious historian of course, and Revolution And Revolutionaries is a serious book but that doesn't stop him gently mocking in its pages the likes of Trotsky and seeing the comical side of certain events. Interestingly, he relays an anecdote about the time the BBC asked him to give a talk on the man he most admired in history. He offered to talk on Captain Swing but then for some unknown reason the BBC never got back to him about it. Was there an anti-Captain Swing bias at the BBC? Or perhaps the BBC thought Taylor was mocking them by suggesting a person who may never have even existed?

For all that, the best parts of the book is when Taylor is quoting some of the revolutionaries he's writing about such as Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor and his habit of addressing crowds as 'Ye horny-handed sons of toil'. 

Or anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his 'Universal suffrage is counter-revolution'. 

Or better still, French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui who on being asked what would happen after the revolution, replied 'If you are on one bank of a river you can have no idea what are the problems on the other side. LET US CROSS THE RIVER AND SEE.'

John Serpico