A Deep Dive into Jacques Ellul's "Autopsy of Revolution" pt. 1: Revolt and Revolution

What is the difference between a revolt and a revolution? How does a revolt become a revolution and why it is vital for our current moment to understand how this happens and what it means.

41. A Deep Dive into Jacques Ellul's "Autopsy of Revolution" pt. 1: Revolt and Revolution

I can't believe the news today
Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away

How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? How long?

'Cause tonight
We can be as one
Tonight

Broken bottles under children's feet
Bodies strewn across the dead-end street
But I won't heed the battle call
It puts my back up, puts my back up against the wall

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Alright, let's go

And the battle's just begun
There's many lost, but tell me who has won?
The trenches dug within our hearts
And mothers, children, brothers, sisters torn apart

Sunday, Bloody Sunday
Sunday, Bloody Sunday

How long, how long must we sing this song?
How long? How long?

That was the first two stanzas of U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” For me, I first heard the song when I was 17, after the 1983 live album “Under a Blood Red Sky” came out. It is still one of my all time favorites. It had a raw energy. It commemorated the Bogside Massacre of 26 unarmed civilians at the hands of British soldiers on January 30, 1972, many of whom were fleeing or helping the wounded. All were Irish Catholics. It was seen as an event symbolic of an intolerable English rule over the Irish people. The massacre was a pointed accusation against what was seen as an unjust and oppressive occupation. The song asks the question, again and again, “How long?”

In the opening of Jacques Ellul’s “Autopsy of Revolution,” he begins his book long examination of the nature, characteristics and development of the idea, history and sociology of revolution by observing that there are two enduring features of every historical revolt: the sense of the intolerable and the accusation of injustice and/or oppression. The rebel has reached the point where he cannot take it any longer. His limit has been reached. It is not necessarily a matter of any principles or concepts or even ideology. Rebellions occur because people feel they cannot go on living the way things are. The current situation must come to an end.

The rebel is fighting for the integrity of his being, for himself and his life. History cannot continue anymore along its current path. I talked recently about the idea of “history” in a recent piece:

Rejecting the Idea of History

A revolt, argues Ellul, is anchored to the idea of “History,” not in its acceptance or formation. The rebel is not making “history.” Rather, the rebel is rejecting “history.” The rebel is saying “enough is enough.”

Ellul draws our attention to the idea that rebellion is deeply related to an older idea of freedom, one that seems almost alien to us today. We generally look at freedom as the ability to make choices without any limits or restrictions. No one should be able to impose upon us any unchosen restraints, bonds or attachments. Ellul draws our attention to an older idea of freedom, as release from the intolerable and unbearable situation.

“Prior to the eighteenth century, freedom had another significance, a directly human one: escape from the unbearable, from the design of destiny whose immediate fact was the oppressor.”

To me this resonates well with a Biblical understanding of the freedom which God’s saving grace brings to us. The freedom of grace is a release from bondage and oppression to the devil and to our own sinful nature. Human sinfulness and bondage to the evil one is humanity’s intolerable, unbearable situation. The sacrifice of God brings release and sets the prisoners free. You are given a new beginning under the rule of new and better King. A passage like this from Paul’s letter to the Galatians makes much more sense if we understand freedom in this way.

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1

And it makes the framing of Jesus’ commission of Paul on the road to Damascus more understandable:

“ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied. ¹⁶ ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me. ¹⁷ I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them ¹⁸ to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’” Acts 26:15b-18

The act of salvation is a liberation from the cruel and unjust rule of Satan. You are set free from the intolerable and unbearable oppression of the devil, and are brought under the benevolent rule of God in Christ.

This understanding of freedom also informs the ideas contained in the Declaration of Independence which formalized the rebellion of the colonies against the British Empire. The language is clearly that of the intolerable situation which induces a people to act:

“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

Having laid the ground work, establishing the basic idea of the “revolt,” he then begins to delineate the difference between a “revolt” and a “revolution.” Ellul argues that a revolution is always constructive, in that it builds towards the future. The revolution wants to put in place a better tomorrow. A revolt, on the other hand is always an “earth-rending upheaval in the face of an unknowable future.” Essentially, what separates a revolt from a revolution is that a revolution has a plan for the future. A revolt does not lead anywhere.

“Even when a revolt succeeds temporarily, it does not know what to do with victory.”

It is not winning a revolt that makes a revolt into a revolution. A nomad can invade the city and conquer it, but not have any clue what to do next. So he takes his spoils and returns back to the wilderness from whence he came. The rebel does not know how to create history. The rebellion is a refusal, a rejection of the current trajectory of history. Thus, asks Ellul, what would Spartacus have done with Rome as the leader of a rebellious band of slaves? After winning his victory, he retreats from power, from the necessity of organizing a society and the order he should have established.

Thus, a rebellion is the willingness to embrace death as more tolerable than the current situation. It is the grasping of freedom, even if it means his own death and the death of his his society. The rebel is willing to tear it all down for blessed release from the current moment. There is nothing beyond victory. The rebel only moves toward death.

Understanding this, we must ask, has the current situation reached the point where things are so intolerable that death is the best viable alternative to things staying the same? There is still a lot of excess in the system. People complain a lot, but on the whole life is still ok. At what point, though, with the current regime, will that situation change?