Edmund Burke cast an indignant eye across the English Channel at the French Revolution and wrote sarcastically: "Amidst assassination, massacre and confiscation, they are forming plans for the good order of future society." Burke was the prototype of skepticism about certain revolutions. Since the French Terror, history has paraded past too many Utopian dramas of transformation that ended by being as totalitarian, as murderous, as the regimes that they swept away—triumphs of hopeful zealotry over experience. Stalin turned the Russian Revolution into a self-devouring machine that crushed its own in the basement of the Lubyanka. Especially because of the Soviet redemptive passion that ended in the Gulag, revolution in this century has lost much of its violent romance. Outsiders have learned not to judge revolutions quickly. They wait for the other boot to drop.
The Iranian uprising has prompted among the industrial powers a complicated wariness, along with the anxiety and attentive respect due to the world's second largest exporter of crude oil. Without the wealth buried in Iran, much of the fascination would vanish. Since most of the world was unprepared for the uprising and ignorant of Iran's internal stresses, it is difficult for outsiders to know what to make of the revolution. Iranians themselves are no longer certain. Nearly everyone who has carefully watched the event agrees on two propositions:
> It has been a widely popular uprising, virtually spontaneous, with support in almost every area of Iranian life.
> The revolution is far from over. Its ultimate meaning has not yet developed.
All revolutions are unique, for roughly the same reasons that, as Tolstoy said, all unhappy families are unhappy in different ways. In The Anatomy of Revolution, the late Crane Brinton, the Harvard historian, attempted to formulate the stages of revolution. First, in Brinton's model, comes the euphoric phase of good feeling, when expectations and perfectionist rhetoric run high. Soon the practical tasks of governing split moderates and radicals. In the second stage, extremists rise and consolidate their power. Next comes the Terror, when the regime desperately tries to accomplish revolutionary goals no matter what the cost in blood. This horror often engenders a Thermidorean reaction (named for Thermidor, the month of the French revolutionary calendar in which the reaction occurred), when moderates regain control and the nation begins a period of convalescence. But ahead lies the danger of the fifth stage: the coming of a dictator still fired by some revolutionary zeal, and beyond that, the possibility, of a Bourbonism restored.
Brinton was following the classic pattern of European revolutions, which can translate only partially into other times and other cultures. But some events of the Iranian revolution already correspond disconcertingly to the Brinton pattern: the first euphoria of victory dissolving into factionalism, and now some possibility that leftists among the revolutionaries, better organized than the masses who drove out the Shah, may seize power. As in France, the tenure of forbearance may be short; already Qasr prison, emptied of its prisoners of the Pahlavi regime, is filling again, this time populated by the enemies of the revolution.