Life Cycle of a Revolution, Part 2
Last week, we covered the first stages of the life cycle of a revolution, as the existing regime is destabilized, exposed, and ultimately, revolutionary forces are violently unleashed upon it. Subscribers were able to read how I applied the lessons about these phases to a revolution in my own homebrew world.
As a reminder: this is not meant to be the only analysis of revolutionary history possible. Instead, it is an outline for worldbuilders, to give revolutionary stories in your world depth and plausibility. The inspiration and main source for this series is the fantastic Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan, who is using the framework he built to tell a science fiction narrative, just as I'm encouraging you to do!
This week, we pick up where we left off. The revolution has begun, popular forces have been unleashed, but it is not yet won by the revolutionaries.
Historical Cycle
Phase 4: Victory
Most attempted revolutions fail. So even once the revolution has begun, they are going up against the regime that has seemed unbeatable for generations, and only destabilized recently. The revolutionaries are a cross-class alliance; that popular forces have been unleashed means that the revolutionaries can come from disaffected members of the royal house and reform-minded (or "restorationist"– as we talked about last week) nobility to a peasant looking simply for a system that will give them more land. Most people sit out the revolution for being too dangerous, but the revolutionary coalition includes people from all sectors of society. Your revolutionaries should not have a single monolithic agenda but are each in it for their own reasons.
That said, I am standing by my argument in my article about faction-building: these can be a little monolithic at the beginning to avoid muddling the story, and Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast seems to agree with me. Specifically, you should have a unifying trait for the revolutionary cause, even as you make it clear that the revolution is not entirely in agreement with itself on everything, sewing the seeds of future conflict.
These uniting factors can be geographic: we are over here, and the sovereign is over there (this works well for things like the American Revolution, where a colony is breaking free). They can also be religious or idealistic: we believe in X, while the sovereign believes in Y. This can be religious conflict, but it can also take the form of abstract notions of "equality"--terms vague enough that equality to the banker and equality to the peasant mean different things. Even if neither of these is present, the sovereign as an impediment (going back to last week's notion of resistance and frustration) can be sufficient to unite a revolutionary cause.
Importantly, this revolutionary coalition does not have a single, unifying, charismatic leader. There will be leaders, and some of them will have a following, but they are just one leader among many. The figures of Lenin, Washington, and Toussaint L'ouverture do not play an outsized role in this initial revolution, though they might still be one of the many leaders. Still, as I talked about in my article on factions, having a single point NPC can really help players make sense of the situation, and so my recommendation is to have this person be a member of the early revolution and not a leader.
Back to the revolution's actual progression. For a revolutionary victory, there needs to be mobilization of an army. This can be a regular army (like the Continental Army in the American Revolution), volunteer militias (like the French National Guard) or something more improvised (mob rule erecting barricades for their own hyperlocal defense of their neighborhood).
Still, for the revolution to win, the existing regime needs to lose. The ties binding people to the old regime need to be fraying and decaying. "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."
And, for the existing regime to fall, Duncan describes there as being "loss of faith, loss of trust, and loss of will."
Loss of faith takes place in the army, as people across the ranks start seeing the government's interests as no longer united with theirs. They may sympathize with the revolutionaries, or they might simply want someone more competent on the throne. Loss of faith means that the soldiers and officers start thinking that their orders are going to get them killed, and so it might be better to not carry those orders out, or to not carry them out with a lot of zeal.
Loss of trust is the inverse of that: it is top-down distrust. As the soldiers start thinking that the sovereign is not worth listening to, the existing regime starts fearing that his soldiers are going to mutiny. As a result, they are hesitant to actually deploy troops to crush the revolution, because they are worried that an order to shoot civilians is going to lead to a military revolt as well.
Lastly, loss of will is the moment of surrender. Rarely is every existing apparatus of the government successfully overthrown. Rather, they give up and cut deals. This can take days to years to accomplish, but a successful revolution eventually sees the government's top ministers saying "it is time. It is no longer worth the cost of the fight." As a result, the monarch goes into exile (far more common than execution) or the colony is granted independence. The revolution is over.
Phase 5: Entropy of Victory
The revolution is won! The days after are marked by celebration. But when the revels are over, the revolutionaries start looking at each other with fresh eyes and realizing that what I meant and what you meant by the aims of the revolution are different.
Duncan identifies a bunch of common clusters that emerge in the post-revolutionary glow. When plotting a campaign about a revolution, these are great factions to be considering and putting a single face to during the Phase 4 narrative where the focus is still on one revolutionary faction. Don't fully break the revolutionary faction into pieces until that phase is over, but starting to introduce NPC leaders of these sub-factions is worthwhile so that they do not seem completely new.
Group 1: Reluctant Revolutionaries. These are members of the old ruling class who were fed up with specific ministers and specific policies of the former sovereign. They had been willing to compromise with the sovereign to avoid revolution, but a stubborn old regime meant that they were forced into the revolutionary camp. They are fearful of the popular forces unleashed. Their main objective after the revolution is to get things back to normal, just with new leadership--ideally, one of their own.
Group 2: Reformers. These are members of the old ruling class who saw deep problems with the system. These are often liberal, reformist nobles like Lafayette or Mirabeau. They want a new system to be built that will allow for further reforms to be accomplished without violence. "The revolution was supposed to be the beginning of something, not the end of anything." But their goal is systemic political reform, not a complete overthrow of the social order. They see Group 1 as a major threat, because they believe that if everything returned to how it was but with new leadership, the ground would be paved for a second revolution. But the violent mob in the streets is also a threat that would overturn everything, and so some semblance of order must be restored.
Group 3: Radicals. These are people who do not think that order is the goal. Instead, they want to see a new world be built. They want social change, not just political reform. "Radical leaders like Lenin and Trotsky and Robespierre and Danton may have cheered the streets and riled up the streets, but they were not from the streets."
Group 4: Urban Workers. These are the "people" who everyone is so fond of talking about. They are the ones who built barricades and actually did the street fighting to overthrow the old regime. While political liberty is great, what they want more than all is cheap and plentiful bread. In fact, a revolutionary policy they might support is sending armed cadres out into the countryside to requisition grain, to keep bread cheap and plentiful. Often, they want an overturning of the old social order, not just the political order.
Group 5: Rural Peasants. The peasants, like the urban workers, also fought and died on the ground for the revolution. Like the urban workers, their focus is also more on economic changes than lofty political abstractions. But where the urban workers want cheap bread, the peasants hate that. What they really want is land, and to be paid more for their grain, and then to be left to their own devices. Forced requisitions of grain? Absolutely terrible. Often, these villages also are less exposed to new social ideas as well, and so while they'd love to overthrow the landlords, they otherwise tend to embrace social conservatism. They want their churches, for example, and when the Paris radicals in the French Revolution wanted to abolish the church, many of the rural peasants became die-hard counter-revolutionaries.
At the same time as all of these 5 groups are fragmenting, regionalism is also rearing its head. Should the South of the US be independent of the North, if both have broken away from Britain? Should Venezuela and Ecuador and Columbia be one larger entity, or three smaller ones? So whether to have a new central system or a more federal system--or a completely independent set of new orders--is a primary new question for the revolutionary regime to consider.
It is going to be difficult to map where any person falls on this spectrum because so many factors are at play: their economic position, their personality, their regional affiliation, and even just petty personal differences with a leader of that faction. Trying to distinguish the political platforms of all the different factions in the Russian Revolution is really hard, and mostly boils down to your opinions on Lenin.
Conclusion
Last week, the revolution began. This week, they won, and immediately started drawing lines in the sand dividing a once united faction. NPCs representing these different divisions should be introduced during the process of winning the revolution, so that the factions feel like they've emerged mostly naturally. But it is important to remember that the revolution is not over after the initial victory. Next week, we'll talk about the phases that make up the general "second wave" of the revolution.
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