RIVOLUZIONE. — Great uncertainty still surrounds the exact definition of the term. The revolutionary event is so complex in its causes and in the elements composing it that it is extremely difficult to determine the constants to be included in a single concept. The not always consistent use of the word, and its similarity to other related terms, complicate scientific inquiry to some extent. Nevertheless, there now appears to be a certain agreement in understanding the r. not in the sense of any political upheaval, but in the more specific sense of a movement that tends substantially to change the social, political, and legal order of a country, replacing it with a new one which, in the preparatory phase, represents the goal toward whose attainment the movement is directed.
I. GENERAL NOTIONS AND RELATED TERMS. — According to this concept, which appears to be the most scientifically exact, the r. presupposes a political and social order no longer corresponding to the needs of the community; a movement destined to overwhelm it; and a new order, upon whose attainment the movement subsides into equilibrium. It is therefore not particularly difficult to distinguish the r. from other similar social events, which generally lack the specific element of establishing a new order. Sedition, in fact, may arise from particular causes and be exhausted in the solution of limited problems, without affecting the existing order. A greater distinction separates the r. from rebellion, the uprising of the popular masses or of discontented portions of the population against the directives of the authorities, and therefore essentially an act of violent insubordination. These forms may undoubtedly become mingled with the revolutionary movement, but they do not constitute its dominant and distinctive feature.
It is commonly held today that the use of violence, which always accompanies sedition and rebellion, is not intrinsic to the r., which may unfold in forms that are also peaceful and no less transformative of the social order. Such, in fact, was the Christian r. Nevertheless, apart from this singular case, in political r. an act of force almost always accompanies their assertion and is ordinarily their instrument, serving to break the resistance that the old order opposes to the rising tide of the new currents. It may therefore be affirmed that, although violence is not intrinsic to the concept of r., it is rarely found separated from II. A r. without the use of force could take place, in the political sphere, only if the social transformation occurred through the work and influence of a strong personality who used legally possessed political power to put it into effect, as, for example, Pietro il Grande of Russia did.
The expressions passive and active resistance, commonly used by Catholic writers, do not coincide with the more modern meaning of r. The former includes only a refusal to obey an imposed law, which in certain cases is not merely lawful but also obligatory; the latter bears a greater resemblance to r. and could almost be reduced to it when active resistance is directed against the powers of the State. Nevertheless, although this marked resemblance must be taken into account in undertaking a moral and juridical evaluation of the r., among Catholic theorists the expression has a limited meaning, deriving from the particular question of tyranny, in connection with which it is used. Nor is r. the coup d’état, a transformation of the order carried out by an act of force by the very public authorities, which act beyond the limits permitted by the constitution in force. A coup d’état may also form part of a revolutionary process, but in itself it is not a r.; perhaps the suddenness and rapidity of the movement must likewise be excluded from its specific characteristics. The fact that it usually manifests itself as the sudden explosion of forces long held in check may indicate only that, in ordinary cases, this is the culminating point of a broad process, which has undergone a period of psychological preparation and will undergo one of consolidation for the establishment of the new order. The moment of organized violence is overwhelming, but it does not belong to the intrinsic elements of the concept of r.
II. CAUSES AND MORAL AND JURIDICAL CONTENT OF THE REVOLUTION. — The causes that usually produce these abrupt turns in the history of peoples are multiple and diverse in nature. One must beware of adopting in their investigation the system of monovalence, as happens when their emergence is attributed solely to the economic factor.
The French Revolution, for example, was predominantly the work of the Enlightenment, which first undermined the moral and juridical foundations on which the ancien régime rested, and propagated the new ideals of freedom and equality. As in every social phenomenon, so too in the revolution the ideological and spiritual element can never be absent, since a new political and social order cannot be established unless there exists a nucleus of ideas, perhaps obscurely and vaguely intuited at the beginning of the process, but always present at its core. In general terms, it may be said that a revolution is neither prepared nor enters its propulsive phase until a profound breach has opened between the ruling class and the social body.
Opinions differ concerning the moral and juridical content of the revolution. The revolutionary theory based on the concept of popular sovereignty, as imagined and described by Rousseau, must be regarded as superseded. Having conceived the holders of social authority as delegates of the people, removable through an contrary expression of the so-called general will, it declared every revolution legitimate, seeing in it nothing but the exercise of political power by the sole subject who, by nature, would have been invested with it in an inalienable manner. Although proceeding from different principles, Fichte arrived at the same conclusion. According to him,
the people could never be rebellious, since in fact and in law they represented the supreme power. Any form of historicism, and especially idealistic historicism, is compelled to legitimize every revolutionary movement as a moment in which the rationality of history is realized or the physical and biological forces of society assert themselves. Sound criticism has by now dispelled the myth of popular sovereignty in the sense attributed to it by the philosopher of Geneva, and has opposed historicism with the argument that it destroys moral values and denies any trace of normative virtue to the essential principles regulating human coexistence. Against the revolutionary consequence of such currents, the condemnation pronounced in its time by Pius IX in the Syllabus remains valid: « To deny obedience, indeed to rebel, against legitimate rulers is lawful » (prop. LXIII).
The solutions currently prevailing with regard to the problem of the ethical content of the revolution can be schematically reduced to two: the first sociological in foundation, the second rather juridical in nature. Some believe that the revolution finds its justification in that right which, underground, is continually renewed in the social conscience and which, at a given historical moment, comes into irreconcilable conflict with the political form and institutions in force. The revolution would heal this discord, which is at once a sign of grave illness in the social organism and its remedy. The second solution, by contrast, claims to rest on purely juridical elements. The revolution in itself would be nothing more than a pure fact, juridically incapable of evaluation, since at that moment it opposes the only existing law, namely, the law of the State. In the event of success, however, the entire revolutionary process would be legalized through a kind of reaction that the effect exercises upon the cause, or through a kind of retroactive efficacy that the new legal order would exert upon the acts to which it owes its origin. The revolution itself would develop within its own bosom a law of its own, imperfect, vague, and defective—a law, if one wishes, unjust, but genuine law, like that which arises in any association on the margins of the State’s legal order.
With regard to these theories, it must first of all be observed that the sociological origin of law is open to question. Although it must be admitted that the social conscience continually reworks the norms of coexistence through a process of ever-deeper reflection, it cannot be maintained that it is the true source of law, or at least of all law, without lapsing into moral and juridical relativism. The proximate source of the most fundamental norms of associated life is human nature, and its herald is the individual conscience. It is in these, and not in some right variable in time and space, that the criterion for evaluating the revolution must be sought; otherwise one returns to the thesis of its unconditional legitimacy. Nor can it escape notice that, in the second view, the justification of the revolution rests solely on the accomplished fact, on victorious force, to which law would affix its seal of legitimacy merely because it had succeeded in triumphing. A pure fact, however, does not become law, nor can it give rise to law by virtue of the principle requiring proportion between cause and effect. There is also a contradiction in terms in that unjust law which the revolution would develop within its own bosom, since law and justice are ontologically joined and correlative.
III. CATHOLIC DOCTRINE
Catholic doctrine is not unanimous in resolving the problem mentioned. Particularly after the French R., some theorists began to incline toward entirely rigid positions, excluding in every case and circumstance the legitimacy of revolutionary insurrection against constituted authority. Taparelli, for example, was among these; according to him, even in the case of unbearable despotism, the citizen would have no other recourse than to turn to God, in whose hands lie the will and life of tyrants. Leo XIII showed himself favorable to this solution in the encyclical Quod apostolici numeris, of 28 December 1879, where he wrote: « Nevertheless, should it sometimes happen that public authority is exercised by princes capriciously and beyond measure, the doctrine of the Catholic Church does not permit private individuals to rise up against them at their own discretion, lest the tranquillity of order be further disturbed and greater harm thereby befall society. And when matters have reached such a point that no other hope of salvation remains, it wishes the remedy to be hastened by the merits of Christian patience and by fervent prayers to the Lord ».Nonetheless, the majority of Catholic theorists have remained faithful to the old tradition, which goes back to Giovanni di Salisbury and along its course encounters the names of s. Tommaso d'Aquino, Suárez, Bellarmino, De Lugo and, in more recent times, Cathrein, Meyer and card. Zigliara, among others (cf. D. Bañes, In Sum. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃx, q. 64, a. 3, concl. 1; Sylvius, In Sum. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃx, q. 64, a. 3, concl. 2; C. Billuart, De iure et iustitia, diss. X, a. 2 ad 3; R. Bellarmino, De conc. auct., l. II, cap. 19; F. Suárez, Defensio fidei, l. VI, cap. 4 § 15 etc.). The problem debated by them properly concerns the licitness or otherwise of active resistance against tyranny and despotism, but the principles they established can very well be adapted to the r. accompanied by the use of violence, which is the most frequent case. Schematically, their thought is as follows. Social life, the juridical and institutional order, and authority are nothing other than means ordered to the good of the human person, so that the latter may attain the greatest abundance of temporal well-being. Their immanent end and their reason for being consist, therefore, in the common good of the political body, toward which both the social activity of individual citizens and lesser associations and that of the powers of the State remain organically directed. Now, in addition to having a stable element corresponding to the more universal and profound needs of human nature, the common good also has a changeable element, deriving from the incessant movement to which collective life is subject. A dynamic social life must therefore correspond, according to the thought of s. Tommaso (De regimine principum, l. I, cap. 6), to a dynamic order and a flexible authority capable of interpreting its needs. Yet the tendency of the latter is to harden into static forms, so that rifts open between new demands and the institutions in force. As the rift widens because of the rigidity of the system, the danger of a conflict between citizens and the power of the State emerges. When such circumstances arise, the first duty of citizens and authority is to undertake, through ordinary and peaceful channels and with the legal means at their disposal, the structural reforms necessary to prevent the widening of the conflict, adapting the social order to the imperious demands of political reality. If, on the other hand, authority persists in defending institutions that have become wholly or partly anachronistic, the specter of the violent rupture of the false equilibrium arises.
Even in this circumstance, the r. does not yet become licit if possibilities for legal reform remain and the evils are not so grave as to place the common good in serious danger. The r. may be compared to war, the use of violence in the international sphere, which morality and law permit one to undertake only as an extrema ratio, when, peaceful means having been exhausted, no other way presents itself of obtaining reparation or respect for a certain and proportionately grave right. If, therefore, society threatens to fall into ruin because of the serious harm inflicted upon the common good by the unjust attitude of the ruling class, and no possibility remains of bending it through the use of legal means, the r. may be considered licit, provided—and this must be added among the conditions of such licitness—that it is not foreseeable that it will bring the community more harm than that which it intends to remedy.
The older writers based this conclusion on the democratic conception of power, according to which the people, the original subject of authority, transmits it to those who are to exercise it, through an explicit or implicit pact, on condition that it be used to promote the common good. If, instead of being promoted, this good is seriously compromised by the inertia or ill will of those constituted in authority, and every legal avenue is barred for preventing social collapse, political power returns to rest upon the people, who have retained it radically, and the people have the right to provide for their own destinies. Some more modern moralists, not accepting the theory of the democratic origin of power, base the same conclusion on the right of legitimate self-defense. The social entity, as a moral person, possesses the right to defend its own life and integrity; and therefore, if the unjust resistance of authority or its oppressive measures were to reduce it to such extremes as to place its essential goods in serious and grave danger, thereby bringing it to the brink of ruin, it possesses by natural law the power to repel the unjust aggression arising from the abuse of political power.
According to the most common Catholic doctrine, not every r. is therefore intrinsically illicit. Yet its justice or injustice depends neither on its triumph nor on a false posthumous legality, but on the motives upon which it rests from its inception—that is, on its conformity or nonconformity to the natural and rational juridical order, whose norms every social action must obey. Now, that order is not always and in every circumstance the guardian of authority: it defends authority when it fulfills the function that is its reason for being; it abandons it when authority betrays that function through incapacity or malice. The recent Spanish r., declared legitimate by the entire episcopate of that country, offers the freshest example of the force of the principles and conclusions set forth above.
Above all, the principal one, namely, the pre-eminence of the common good considered as the permanent norm of social life, underlies the solution of the other question, no less important than the preceding one from the moral and juridical standpoint, raised by the triumph of an unjust revolution and the consequent establishment of a de facto government. However the speculative problem of the source of the binding force of the laws enacted by it may be resolved, it is certain that citizens are obliged to obey its injunctions, directed toward maintaining order for the regular conduct of collective life, provided that they are not unlawful. Nor does such submission imply recognition of the legitimacy of the de facto government. This government may, however, in time become legitimate through the influence of that same fundamental norm concerning the pre-eminence of the common good. This good requires, in fact, that, so as not to disturb the order established by the revolutionary government now consolidated in power, it should continue to guide the community with full authority to make every provision for its welfare, and thus either through a kind of prescription, as some have called it, or through custom, or better still by virtue of a moral requirement whose precise nature need not be determined, it communicates to the government effective sovereignty with all the rights connected with II. Once the moment arrives—which cannot be determined mathematically—when the common good calls for the stability of the political and social order achieved through the revolution, natural law seals the de facto government with the seal of legitimacy, not converting the mere fact into law, but superimposing upon the fact a juridical authority deriving from another source.