Revolutions tend to destroy their own leaders, as successive factions turn on one another.
The Genevan journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan wrote in 1793 that, like Saturn, the revolution devours its children, and the Girondin Pierre Vergniaud is reported to have said the same before his execution that year. The French Revolution went on to guillotine Danton and then Robespierre, and the pattern was later seen in the Soviet purges of the 1930s.
In practice
- A reform faction takes over a party, splits, and within five years has expelled most of its founders.
- A start-up that ousted its cautious founder later ousts the executive who ousted him.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that revolutions destroy the rules that protect losers, so disputes between factions become lethal. Another is competitive radicalism: each faction proves its purity by denouncing the last.
- In its favour
- Consistent with the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions and with research on purity spirals in radical movements.
- Against it
- The American Revolution did not devour its leaders, who went on to govern and retire, and several later revolutions ended in stable settlements. Whether the pattern belongs to revolutions or to the absence of institutions is debated.
- Standing
- Compare the purity spiral and morbid symptoms.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works