So, in socials we have been doing revolutions and I had to come up with a question to do with revolutions that I am supposed to answer in this blog post. Anyway my question was “have revolutions failed because the group in charge looked at the stages of revolutions and saw what was going on”.

Now, what I meant by the stages of revolutions is a theory proposed by Crane Brinton. It states that all revolutions follow a similar pattern. He said that there are four stages to a revolution: the first one is the preliminary stage. This normally happens when there is some sort of class division and the government is economically weak. This is really when the revolution starts brewing.

 

Crane Brinton

Stage two is when things start to escalate. This is when people start to organize and form groups who are against the current government.

Stage three is when said groups begin to advertise to the public, they do this through things like protests, speeches and propaganda flyers. There is a expectancy for the government to use aggressive actions to stop revolutions and this doesn’t always work. Often governments really want a revolution to end quickly as most good revolutions have a snowball effect to them. Basically as a revolution goes on for longer, more and more people sway to the side of the people fighting the government therefore making it more difficult to stop. However if the government does overreact then this can lead to them losing credibility in the eyes of the public. So what the government needs is a nice balance between violence and just watching.

Stage four is political and economic non cooperation. This means that people participate in certain events in order to get their points across to the government. These involve things like labour strikes and tax refusal. This will affect the government pretty harshly and they will most oftenly crack down or meet the demands of the people.

In the final stage if the revolution is successful then the governments have been over run or have listend to the demands of the people. Changes will have been made and eventually things go back to normal.

The French in the 1848 revolution

Ok, so back to the question has a revolution been stopped by the government predicting the stages and working against the group of people? The answer is yes, for example the revolution of 1848 involved people of multiple nations rising up against their governments. It failed because the governments looked at what was happening and instead of instantly repeling the attack. The monarchs of Europe decided that it would be best to work together and the revolution was ended within a year.

This is just one of many but I thought it would suit best as it involved a more planned approach by multiple governments to stop the peasants fighting to escape their serfdom. This I think does answer the question really well and is one of the more interesting revolutions.