Speaking of Words
By MICHAEL FERBER
As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution this July, we might take a moment to think about what the word revolution means, and what it has meant during its long history before 1776 and after. It might surprise some readers.
It was first of all an astronomical term, as it remains today. The poet John Gower, in the earliest surviving use in English (1393), refers to “the revolution of heaven.” Its sources, Middle French and Late Latin (revolutio), also had this primary sense. The title of Copernicus’ great treatise that argued for a heliocentric model of the cosmos was De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) (1543). It’s fascinating that we now speak of “the Copernican revolution” in quite a different sense of the word he used. A revolution in its astronomical sense is a return to a starting point, a cycle, an anniversary; anniversary means “turning of a year,” from annus “year” and vertere “turn.” One revolution of the sun, under the pre-Copernican model of the solar system, is one year. We now say the earth revolves around the sun—it makes one revolution—in a year.
Revolution is also still used to mean rotation, notably in our phrase revolutions per minute (or rpm), but in astronomy now these two terms are carefully distinguished: the earth rotates on its axis once a day, while it revolves around the sun once a year. If rotation could substitute for revolution in every usage, today we might be celebrating the American Rotation.
The reason we are not is that revolution long ago took on personal, social, and political senses derived from its technical meaning in the skies. At least as early as Chaucer (1400), it could mean “alteration, upheaval, or reversal of fortune”; he wrote, “It is of love as of fortune … For it is I that am come down through change and revolution.” Fortune, of course, has a wheel, like one of the great circles in the heavens. In 1614 William Camden wrote, “All things run round, and as the seasons of the year, so men’s manners have their revolutions.” But at least as early as 1572 one could write, “We have seen in example most mighty Monarchies by an interchange and revolution of things, to be translated from one people to another.” By then it could mean a change in regime, not necessarily a deep transformation of a society but a coup d’état or an abrupt revolving (or rotating) of elites.
When we consider British history of the last 400 years, the events that most deserve the name revolution were the civil war of 1642-49, the beheading of King Charles I, and the “interregnum” between then and 1660, during most of which Oliver Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector. That looks like a revolution in the modern political sense, and some modern historians so call it, but it was called then by its enemies, and is still known as, the Great Rebellion. What followed in 1660, when the “rebellion” was defeated and the monarchy was reinstated under Charles II, is called the Restoration. The royalist Earl of Clarendon, who began writing his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England during the Rebellion itself, occasionally called the Restoration “the Revolution”! And why not, since in his eyes events had come full circle when a Stuart returned to the throne.
When the last Stuart, James II, was dethroned and replaced by his daughter Mary and her husband William of Orange, the Stadtholder of Holland, in 1688-89, that event was called a revolution though it was far less drastic or violent a change than the Rebellion. It was called “the Glorious Revolution” as early as 1716 in a sermon preached by Thomas Bradbury, a Dissenting minister, and “the Bloodless Revolution” some time later, for James’s army more or less dissolved rather than fight William’s Dutch army. (It was far from bloodless in Ireland, however.) So this change of regime, which required an invasion by the Dutch to pull off, is called the Revolution because it aimed to restore the order of things before James turned Catholic and tyrannical. William and Mary swore to govern the kingdom “according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same.” A century later Edmund Burke asserted, “The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties.”
The American patriots first wanted, or claimed to want, a restoration of their rights as Englishmen, rights threatened by certain recent acts of Parliament. Had things been resolved by 1774 or so, we might now be looking back on those days as the American Restoration, or the Great Redress of Grievances, but thanks to the intransigence of Great Britain and the readiness of the colonists to take up arms, what we got was the Revolution. Of course the British called it a revolt, or a rebellion, just as the northern American states in 1861 called the southern secession a rebellion. Some recent historians have questioned whether our Revolution deserves the name, since the same sort of rich white men who ran the colonies before 1776 also ran it after 1781; it was of a rotation of elites. But the six-year war, which was an ugly civil war as well as a war for independence, and the uniting of the thirteen colonies into one federation, brought about enough changes, I think, that we shouldn’t dispute the name. And the changes have continued. The wheel has not been rolled back, though our current President has been trying to restore the monarchy, when America was great.
I have to add that the American Revolutionaries alluded to the old astronomical sense of revolution when they agreed on a flag with thirteen stars on a blue field. But the stars did not revolve their way into the heaven of nations; they were stellae novae, new arrivals that intended to stay, and to multiply.
It was the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and arguably lasted until 1815, that permanently established the word in its modern sense as a thoroughgoing (and violent) overthrow of the existing order and not just another rotation of a wheel. Thomas
Carlyle tells the story of the conversation between Louis XVI and a nobleman who has come to report the storming of the Bastille. “It’s a revolt?” “No, Sire, it’s a revolution.” Historians have argued fiercely over when the “real” revolution was halted, perhaps by the Thermidor reaction in 1794, when the Terror was stopped, or in 1799, when Napoleon in a coup became First Consul, or in 1815, when he was finally defeated at Waterloo and the Bourbons came back. Come back they did, of course, in what was called a restoration. But the new king, Louis XVIII, had to rule as a constitutional monarch and could not undo much that the Revolution had brought about.
The Russian and Chinese Revolutions have driven home the idea that revolutions are huge, drastic, and violent. Can there be a truly bloodless revolution, a transformation of society by nonviolent means? I believe there can be, and it would be more genuinely revolutionary than all the bloody ones. There were voices in the 1770s that called for nonviolent resistance to the British. But that is a topic for another time and place.
I am happy to hear from readers with questions or comments: mferber@unh.edu.
Michael Ferber moved to New Hampshire in 1987 to join the English Department at UNH, from which he is now retired. Before that he earned his BA in Ancient Greek at Swarthmore College and his doctorate in English at Harvard, taught at Yale, and served on the staff of the Coalition for a New Foreign Policy in Washington, DC. In 1968 he stood trial in Federal Court in Boston for conspiracy to violate the draft law, with the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and three other men. He has published many books and articles on literature, and has a deep interest in linguistics. He is married to Susan Arnold; they have a daughter in San Francisco.