<P> At some point in the first stages of the revolutions "there is a point where constituted authority is challenged by illegal acts of revolutionists" and the response of security forces is strikingly unsuccessful . In France in 1789 the "king didn't really try" to subdue riots effectively . In England the king "didn't have enough good soldiers". In Russia "at the critical moment the soldiers refused to march against the people" and instead joined them (p. 88). </P> <P> Revolutions "are born of hope" rather than misery (p. 250). Contrary to the belief that revolutionaries are disproportionately poor or down - and - out, "revolutionists are more or less a cross section of common humanity". While revolutionaries "behave in a way we should not expect such people to behave", this can be explained by the "revolutionary environment" rather than their background (p. 120). "' Untouchables' very rarely revolt", and successful slave revolutions, like Haiti's, are few in number (p. 250). Revolutionaries are "not unprosperous" but "feel restraint, cramp,...rather than downright crushing oppression" (p. 250). </P> <P> In each revolution a short "honeymoon" period follows the fall of the old regime, lasting until the "contradictory elements" among the victorious revolutionaries assert themselves (p. 91). Power then has a tendency "to go from Right to Center to Left" (p. 123). In the process, Brinton says,' the revolution, like Saturn, devours its children', quoting Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud (p. 121). </P> <P> The revolutions being studied first produce a "legal" moderate government . It vies with a more radical "illegal" government in a process known as "dual power", or as Brinton prefers to call it "dual sovereignty". In England the "Presbyterian moderates in Parliament" were rivals of "the illegal government of the extremist Independents in the New Model Army" (p. 135). In France, the National Assembly was controlled by the "Girondin moderates", while the Montagnard "extremists" controlled "the Jacobin network", "the Paris commune", (p. 136) and the Societies of the Friends of the Constitution (p. 162). In Russia, the moderate provisional government of the Duma clashed with the radical Bolsheviks whose illegal government was a "network of soviets" (p. 136). </P>

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