The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [422]
Again we see this tragic pattern in the fate of every failed rebellion against a ruling order, from the revolt of Spartacus against Rome in 73 BC to the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, from Pugachev's rebellion in Russia in 1773 to the Hungarian rising against the Communists in 1956 or Che Guevara's attempt to overthrow the Bolivian Government in 1967. In each case, if we examine the course taken by such a rebellion, we see how it is shaped by the five-stage pattern. Initially the rebels win such support that they dream they can actually overthrow the ruling power. As that power gathers its forces to crush them, the rebels experience increasing frustration, Finally there is the Nightmare Stage when reality closes in on them and it is clear their rebellion has failed. Their leaders and many of their followers are killed.
Where revolutions are apparently successful, we see the five-stage pattern taking a different form. It was the American historian Crane Brinton, in his book The Anatomy of Revolution (1938), who first analysed what might be described the `revolutionary archetype, as he traced the remarkable parallels between the three most influential revolutions in history, those in England in the seventeenth century, France at the end of the eighteenth century, and Russia in the years after 1917. In each case the course of events was unconsciously dictated by what we can now see was that archetypal five-stage pattern.
When in 1789 the French people rose up in the name of liberty against the excessive power and privileges of Louis XVI and the French aristocracy, there was a Dream Stage when it seemed the old order, the ancien regime, was just disintegrating before them. They soon won all the liberties they were demanding. But it is in the nature of fantasy, whether in politics, sex or anything else, that it cannot reach a satisfactory point of resolution. Once unleashed, it becomes unconsciously driven to make ever more extreme demands. In Paris in the early 1790s, as the promised Utopia failed to materialise, with the king, the Father-figure of his country, still on the throne, the relatively moderate Girondins gave way to the more extreme Jacobins, who unleashed an orgy of killing, its symbolic centrepiece in 1793 being the execution of the king and his family. But this only led on to the Terror, the Nightmare Stage, when the revolution turned inward on itself and began, in the famous phrase, to `eat its own children'. As the revolutionaries set up their fearsome dictatorship under the Committee of Public Safety - what Robespierre called `the despotism of liberty against tyranny- it was now they themselves who were being murdered and guillotined in ever greater numbers, culminating in 1794 in the execution by his own Revolutionary Tribunal of Robespierre himself.
This was the shocking event which brought the nightmarish explosion of violence and the five-stage cycle to its climax. France fell back into a state of nervous exhaustion and uneasy calm, characterised also by a frenzied pursuit of sexual and other egocentric pleasures (the unleashing of fantasy in a new and different form) until eventually a new `dream figure' emerged, the successful young general Napoleon. In 1799, when he established himself as his country's new strong man, a new collective fantasy began to take shape. A new five-stage cycle had begun.
The Napoleonic fantasy reached the height of its Dream Stage during the years between 1805 and 1812 when, as self-proclaimed Emperor, he seemed to have all Europe at his feet. In 1812, when his fantasies over-reached themselves in his invasion of Russia, this entered its Frustration Stage, forcing him eventually into humiliating retreat. By now, in the shadows cast over Europe by his vainglorious tyranny, countervailing