1For those writing in Britain later on in the 20th century and even today, the period between 1890 and 1935, with the exception of those years when the nation was actually at war, are often viewed with a certain nostalgia. The elegant Edwardian period is known in French as La Belle Époque, the deliciously decadent Naughty Nineties conjure up images of Oscar Wilde drinking absinthe and wearing a green carnation in his buttonhole, while the Roaring Twenties with the Bright Young Things often evoke above all attractive women’s fashions, vintage cars and wild parties. However, for those who lived through these years, it was an era of great insecurity with the threat of anarchist or Bolshevist revolution and the fear that big, powerful European nations would invade their smaller, weaker neighbours.

2Maya Jasanoff claims that the end of the 19th century was the first era of global revolutionary terrorism. In the 1880s, ‘Irish revolutionaries had dynamited the London Underground, the Tower of London and the House of Commons’ (Jasanoff). In 1894, the French president, Sadi Carnot, was assassinated by the Italian anarchist Cesare Giovanni Santo and an unsuccessful attempt was made to bomb the famous Observatory in London’s Greenwich Park. In 1898, the otherwise popular Empress Elizabeth of Austria died at the hands of an anarchist. In 1900, it was Italian King Umberto’s turn, followed a year later by American president William McKinley. In 1906, a bomb attack at the King of Spain’s wedding to one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters left 25 dead and 130 injured, while in 1920 the Wall Street bombing, in front of the world’s most affluent banker, J. P. Morgan’s, headquarters, led to 38 deaths and hundreds of people being injured. The Russian Revolution and assassination of the Tsar and his family in 1917 was also particularly traumatic for the English people as the Tsar so closely resembled his cousin, King George V. All G. K. Chesterton’s literary production must be seen in this political context.

3Popular impressions of Chesterton himself at this period are also mixed. He is mostly known today as an advocate of the Catholic faith, as a paradoxical humourist and as the author of the Father Brown stories, rather than as an innovative or extreme political thinker. Kenneth M. Hamilton reflects a widely held opinion in his statement about Chesterton: ‘Fundamentally, he did not believe in revolutions’ (115). Yet, surprisingly, Chesterton wrote a lot about revolution and frequently seemed to advocate some form of revolutionary action. For example, his 1909 essay, ‘The Wind and the Trees’, places the desire for revolution in a Christian context and clearly states: ‘Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is also lawful to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom’. Chesterton’s desire for this revolution may be understood from his book published the next year, What’s Wrong with the World, where he strongly denounces the economic inequalities in Britain which prevent the poorest part of the population from living healthy, decent lives and calls for radical change:

With the red hair of one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all modern civilization. Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home: because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be an usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution. (273)

4For Christian thinkers from the Catholic tradition to advocate revolution is obviously not unheard of, although, at the start of the twentieth century, no one would have imagined the Latin American liberation theologians of the 1970s, or that a priest (Camilo Torres) could ever declare that ‘The Catholic who is not a revolutionary is living in mortal sin’ (Gerassi 299). Thomas Aquinas had acknowledged ‘not only the right, but also the duty of resistance to an unjust power’ (D’Entreves 35) and in Chesterton’s own time, the Cristero Revolt in Mexico was encouraged by the Church, to the extent that Archbishop Gonzalez y Valencia wrote from Rome to the revolutionaries: ‘Be tranquil in your consciences and receive our benedictions’ (qtd in Lewy 401). However, in the 19th century and in the first part of the 20th, it was far more common to associate revolutionary Christianity with the Protestant tradition. In Britain, Cromwell and the 17th-century regicides were known to have been committed Protestants, while in France and elsewhere, thinkers like Edgar Quinet explicitly made connections between the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution (Banks 66). He even claimed that ‘the failure of the Reformation in France necessitated the failure of the Revolution’ (Banks 65) and that having missed their opportunity to cultivate freedom in the 16th century, ‘the French condemned themselves to impotent attempts at reform and inevitable failure’ (65) until they abandoned their Catholic mind-set. For this reason, Chesterton, who between 1902 and 1922 was a practising member of the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England and later a convert to Rome, is unusual.

5The revolutionary theme was extremely frequent in Chesterton’s writings between 1901 and the First World War, to the extent that Julia Stapleton named her edited collection of his writings for the Daily News during this period Literature, Liberalism and Revolution. That the author himself agreed that revolution was a key concept in his thought may be discerned from the title of a key chapter in his 1908 autobiographical work, Orthodoxy—‘The Eternal Revolution’. This theme did not stop when Chesterton ceased to work for The Daily News. As Ian Boyd remarks, ‘In 1913 [. . .] he began writing a series of articles for the Socialist Daily Herald in which he continued his violent criticism of parliamentary government and advocated revolution as a solution to the problems of the age’ (266). All these revolutionary writings pre-date the emergence of revolutionary Catholicism in Mexico or elsewhere.

6While it is clear that Chesterton wanted some sort of revolution, exactly what kind of revolution he really sought is less obvious, as is whether he thought there was any chance of obtaining it. This paper shall attempt to define the type of revolution Chesterton did not want to see as well the revolution he truly desired. It shall also examine how he communicated his ideas about this type of revolution and its feasibility in his fiction and particularly in the short story cycle The Man Who Knew Too Much.

The Revolutions Chesterton Did Not Want

7The type of revolution Chesterton most strongly deplored was that advocated by the anarchists and, in particular, by nihilistic anarchists. Chesterton could sympathise with the French Revolution and with Irish Nationalists, because they had a clear idea of what they wanted. Referring to an earlier attempt at revolution in England, the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, he notes that ‘John Ball would have offered to pull down the government because it was a bad government, not because it was a government’ (Chesterton 1922a, 27). Ball’s desire was therefore, for Chesterton, human and comprehensible. On the other hand, Anarchy, in Chesterton’s opinion, wishes to destroy any government, but ‘does not know what it wants’ (Chesterton 1922a, 28), and therefore can only destroy and not create anything new. This is illustrated by the nihilistic anarchists’ usual choice of weapon:

They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high priesthood are happy because it kills somebody. (Chesterton 1908b, 47)

8This is a probable reference to the bombing of King Alonso’s wedding, a year before Chesterton wrote this passage, where the bomb thrown at the bridal carriage was deflected by an electric wire, thus saving the happy couple from almost certain death. Even so, Queen Ena emerged ‘from a wrecked carriage in her blood-spattered white wedding dress while streams of blood flowed along cracks of the pavement’ (Jensen 303).

9However, in spite of Chesterton’s negative portrayal of anarchists, their world view and their acts of violence, he had some ideas in common with more moderate anarchist thinkers. For Ian Boyd, ‘the anarchist element’ in Chesterton’s thought ‘is provided by the distrust of the modern state and the belief in the value of free and self-governing social units’ (271). For although Chesterton accepted the need for some form of central government, he was strongly opposed to any kind of enforced conformity, standardisation or limitations on the individual citizen’s right to run his private life as he saw fit. He and his friends declared their intention ‘to restore that long-forgotten thing called Self-Government: that is, the power of the citizen in some degree to direct his own life and construct his own environment; to eat what he likes, to wear what he chooses, and to have [. . .] a range of choice’ (Chesterton 1926, 124).

10Although he had many Socialist friends, including George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton was also opposed to Socialism and the kind of revolution it sought to instigate. His main reason for this was his perception of Socialism and Capitalism as similar systems, which just had different people in charge. As his most recent biographer, Ian Ker, remarks: ‘What he objected to in Shaw’s Socialism was that it was remarkably like the Capitalism it sought to replace’ (298). His principal objection to the two systems was that, in both, power was concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, whether they were rich businessmen or high-ranking, politicised civil servants. From his point of view, true democracy was only possible when the majority had real political and economic power. By concentrating power in the hands of the state, Socialism created an all-powerful political elite, whom the people would be obliged to trust to act on their behalf. As he claims, with a certain irony in The Outline of Sanity:

There is apparently something elvish and fantastic about saying that when capital has come to be too much in the hands of the few, the right thing is to restore it into the hands of the many. The Socialist would put it in the hands of even fewer people; but those people would be politicians, who (as we know) always administer it in the interests of the many. (2)

11Chesterton’s understanding of the best way to organise a modern democracy were very similar to those outlined by his friend Hilaire Belloc in his 1912 book The Servile State. Belloc perceived just three possible solutions:

1. Collectivism, or the placing of the means of production in the hands of the political officers of the community.

2. This refers to the system desired by the Socialists and, in theory at least, by the British Labour party at the time.

3. Slavery, or a Servile State, in which those who do not own the means of production shall be legally compelled to work for those who do, and shall receive in exchange a security of livelihood.

4. This is how Belloc and Chesterton thought the Capitalist system they were actually experiencing was developing in the short term.

5. Property, or the re-establishment of a Distributive State in which the mass of citizens should severally own the means of production. (5–6)

12This was what they hoped to see established in the future, even if Chesterton was not very optimistic about the chances of this really occurring any time soon.

The Revolution Chesterton Wanted to See

13Chesterton sought a Distributist revolution largely on account of his understanding of what had gone wrong in British society. As his fellow Distributist, Arthur J. Penty, later explained in a pamphlet for the Distributist League: ‘Distributists agree with Socialists in their condemnation of the present system of society, but they think the evil is far more deeply rooted than Socialists suppose’ (7). This evil, for Chesterton and many other Christian thinkers of the time, comes from original sin. Like C. S. Lewis, who believed in democracy because “mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows’ (666), Chesterton was convinced that, left to themselves, in this fallen world the powerful would always tend to abuse their position, if not actively prevented from doing so:

It is our whole point that the central power needs lesser powers to balance and check it, and that these must be of many kinds: some individual, some communal, some official, and so on. Some of them will probably abuse their privilege; but we prefer the risk to that of the State or of the Trust, which abuses its omnipotence. (Chesterton 1926, 33)

14Chesterton believed that even those who started off in favour of helping the poor and oppressed were liable to change once they actually held the power unless the system was constructed in such a way as to prevent this and the people remained vigilant and ready for another revolution:

This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to allow. It must always be on the look out for every privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong. In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists. They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child of man. The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told. Here, I say, I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary. (Chesterton 1908a, 124)

15A genuine revolution, as Chesterton saw it, would be a response to bad government, but also the result of strong ideological convictions. Just as, in The Man Who Was Thursday, anarchist revolutionary violence is described as the result of ‘aberrations of the scientific intellect’ (42), requiring philosophical policemen to ‘trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime’ (43), in world history Chesterton was convinced that there had never been ‘a real revolution, brutally active and decisive, which was not preceded by unrest and new dogma in the region of invisible things’ (Chesterton 1909, 71). For this reason, the outward signs that a revolution is taking place, ‘mobs pouring through palaces, blood pouring down the gutters, the guillotine lifted higher than the throne, a prison in ruins, a people in arms’ (Chesterton 1909, 71) are merely the signs that a revolution in people’s thinking has already occurred and that the revolutionaries have a clear vision of the sort of society they wish to establish.

16In Chesterton’s opinion, thinking Christians already have this clear vision and, although they may disagree on the details, they base their ideal society on the one which was lost at the time of the Fall.

My vision of perfection assuredly cannot be altered; for it is called Eden. To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell. For the orthodox there can always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration. At any instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has seen since Adam. (Chesterton 1908a, 117)

17While Chesterton had no illusions about the possibility of really establishing a perfect society with imperfect human beings or returning to a literal prelapsarian state, he continued throughout his career to call for the revolutionary changes he thought were necessary to recreate a system which would be more just, less corrupt and in which ordinary people would be less easily exploited than in Britain in the early 20th century.

Revolution in Chesterton’s Fiction

18We have already seen some of Chesterton’s ideas about revolution in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday, which he referred to as ‘this anti-Anarchist romance’ (Chesterton 1929, 202). However, although the novel makes it clear why Chesterton opposes the anarchist view of revolution, it does not provide any indication of the author’s preferred alternative. Some of his other early novels also give insights into his views. For example, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), which portrays an unsuccessful revolutionary attempt to recreate a medieval world order, starts with a statement about why the British people were not open to the idea of revolution.

The people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal—such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. (7)

19This belief in evolution, with its slow and gradual changes, is seen in Chesterton’s fictional world to preclude any enthusiasm for revolution which, by definition, signifies that changes will take place in a rapid, abrupt manner. For this reason, the revolution which does take place in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and which is carried by the enthusiasm of one man and the humour of another, but not truly desired by the population, turns out to be a disaster.

20In another early novel, Manalive (1912), Chesterton gives his own understanding of revolution as an attempt to recover a lost paradise to his protagonist Innocent Smith: ‘I am a revolutionist. But don’t you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden’ (162). However, Smith’s revolution is personal rather than social or political and the reader becomes no wiser as to how Chesterton’s revolution could actually take place in practice.

22In all eight stories, Horne Fisher is depicted as a very cynical member of the political class, aware and critical of the moral corruption of many politicians, but unwilling, out of family loyalty, to denounce them. He says to his somewhat naïve Socialist friend, Harold March: ‘If you people ever happen to blow the whole tangle of society to hell with dynamite, I don’t know that the human race will be much worse. But don’t be too hard on me merely because I know what society is’ (13). Although all the stories have a political message, the seventh story, entitled ‘The Temple of Silence’ or ‘The Fool of the Family’ depending on the edition, is the only one to recount an unsuccessful attempt to bring about a Distributist revolution by peaceful means. It is also a flashback to Horne Fisher’s youth and it tells of ‘the first lesson [he] had in what modern politics are made of’ (72). The story is the reason why Fisher became a cynical amateur detective instead of an optimistic politician.

23In ‘The Temple of Silence’, the Fishers are represented as a rich, elite political family attached to the Reform (Liberal/Labour) party, as is their powerful friend Lord Saltoun. At the upcoming General Election, there was going to be a contest in rural Somerset between the financially astute but unpleasant Sir Francis Verner (Constitutional/Conservative)—‘not only a hard landlord, but a mean landlord, a robber as well as a rackrenter’ (77)—and the agreeable but distinctly urban Eric Hughes (Reform), ‘a young man with genuine political enthusiasms’ (76), who opposes the country squires and aims at ‘extending county council control’ (73). Horne Fisher, supported by his brother and Lord Saltoun, decides to stand as an independent third candidate representing the interests of the less affluent rural population with an anti-corruption and clearly Distributist programme. Like Chesterton, Fisher strongly deplores the capitalist landlords who exploit their tenants and employees, but he is also of the opinion that the county council is unlikely to truly represent the interests of the inarticulate majority. He declares his intention to ‘give the squire’s land to the squire’s tenants, instead of dragging in the county council’ (74) and expresses the opinion that ‘agricultural labourers would rather have three acres and a cow than three acres of printed forms and a committee’ (74). The slogan ‘three acres and a cow’ was a catch-phrase of the Distributist movement. It dates back to the 1880s and is usually associated with Jesse Collings, a Devonshire MP and radical agrarian who promoted small holdings and land allocations (‘Three Acres and a Cow’). The expression was in fact first used by Eli Hamshire, a rustic philosopher from Surrey, who used the phrase in letters written to Joseph Chamberlain and Collings (Stemp). Chesterton himself, more at home in town than in rural areas, although he used the phrase, did not take it as seriously as some of his fellow Distibutists, admitting that ‘three acres and a cow may be a joke’ (Chesterton 1926, 31). However, in this story with a clearly rural setting, the easily recognisable slogan allows the reader to understand Fisher’s manifesto without needing to give cumbersome explanations.

24In the story, Fisher’s campaign, ‘championing a new peasantry against a new plutocracy’ (75), with its clearly expressed aim of combatting the dishonest, inconsiderate Verner, attracts a lot of attention. Fisher quickly becomes

the voice of popular feelings that are never found in the popular press [. . .] arguments that had never before been uttered by an educated voice, tests and comparisons that had been made only in dialect by men drinking in the little local public houses, crafts half forgotten that had come down by sign of hand and tongue from remote ages when their fathers were free. (75)

25It becomes clear that Fisher will win the election as ‘all the big meetings were successful and crowds of people promised [him] votes’ (85). At this point, when he least expects it, Fisher is kidnapped at night by a group of men who imprison him in a folly on Verner’s estate. Their strategy would have been successful if the last man to leave the folly had not tripped and fallen, leaving him imprisoned too. Although at first, in the dark, Fisher does not recognise him and he refuses to speak, a flash of lightening reveals that he is Fisher’s brother Harry who, while he is officially a member of the Reform party and was ostensibly campaigning for his brother, has in fact been secretly supporting Verner. At this point, Fisher realises that, even if he wins the election, he will never have any real power, as everyone, including his own family, will gang up against him to preserve their own interests.

26Fisher and his Distributist agenda cannot win without a popular revolution because, as Harry tells him, the elite has already decided what has to happen:

Why, you lunatic . . . you don’t suppose you were meant to win the seat, did you? Oh, it’s too childish! I tell you Verner’s got to get in. Of course he’s got to get in. He’s to have the Exchequer next session, and there’s the Egyptian loan and Lord knows what else. We only wanted you to split the Reform vote because accidents might happen after Hughes had made a score at Barkington. (85)

27Fisher also realises that the country is not ready to revolt for his programme, partly because many of the poor do not want to share out equally the country’s wealth, but rather to be rich themselves: ‘What hope can there ever be of a free peasantry in England if the peasants themselves are such snobs as to want to be gentlemen? How can we make a democracy with no democrats?’ (84). Even the Reform candidate’s agent, who admires Fisher, is not prepared to join him in denouncing Verner for anything he has actually done: ‘You have to do these things in a regular way, you know . . . . People understand slanging squires in a general way, but those personalities aren’t considered fair play. Looks like hitting below the belt’ (77). Hughes too, the Reform candidate, is aware that ‘political opponents are people with whom you may have to dine any day’ (76), and is therefore not prepared to openly criticise Verner’s very real abuses. In fact, Fisher’s experience illustrates the main point of Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton’s book The Party System (1911) which claims that there was ‘secret collusion between leaders of what were represented as being opposing political parties’ (i) and that the powerless voter has no chance of bringing about any real, beneficial change in the system. As a result, although Fisher wins the election, he does not continue his fight in parliament, realising that it would be a waste of time. Since then, he has been ‘rather under a cloud’ (72) with his family and only too aware of the failings of the system. Ironically, Fisher’s brother Harry’s betrayal leads to him getting the job as private secretary to Lord Saltoun (73), the first step on the ladder to becoming a great political figure himself. The elite wins as, in Chesterton’s opinion, it always will unless there is a revolution.

Conclusion

28As Dale Ahlquist points out, many readers of The Man Who Knew Too Much have asked whether Fisher, although he physically and socially resembles Maurice Baring, may not in other ways represent Chesterton himself: ‘Is Fisher simply his mouthpiece to say the things he wants to say without restraint, to be a catharsis for his frustration at the entrenched and corrupt system, which he knows first hand?’ (Ahlquist 2014). While, in general, Chesterton was a much more cheerful person than Fisher, it is clear that the author shared both his desire for revolution and his feeling that it was not going to happen in the near future.

29It is equally certain that the inequalities of Chesterton’s day have not disappeared. If anything, they have increased. Just a few months ago, the press announced that ‘the globe’s richest 1% own half the world’s wealth’ (Neate). In Ahlquist’s opinion, Chesterton’s analysis of the situation is still relevant. Distributism, or any other social system which favours real economic and political equality cannot ‘be imposed from above; it can only spring up from below . . . it seems most likely that it would be ushered in by popular revolution’ (Ahlquist 2011).

30It is now more common for Catholics to share Chesterton’s viewpoint. The current Pope, Francis, has shown sympathy for revolutionary thinkers within the Church and recently canonised the radical Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated in 1980. In spite of this, there is little sign of the revolution Chesterton sought coming any time soon.