Mort la Révolution! Why Does Britain Love a Failed Uprising?
The epic of the peasants' revolt: Paul Greengrass's 'Rebellion' is the latest film in a series depicting a failed attempt to rebuild a country the British consider deviant. We rehash our failures, even when they are fundamentally tangential to a national narrative that should be about conquering empire, slavery, and being relentlessly unpleasant to foreigners. For example, we tell and retell the story of Captain Scott, even though he […]
The British are perverted. We idolize our own failures, even if they are fundamentally tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery, and being unrelentingly unpleasant to outsiders. For example, we tell and retell the story of Captain Scott, even though he died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to the South Pole to the unlikely Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Similarly, Christopher Nolan's 2017 film Dunkirk represented Britain's desire to wrest national glory from the jaws of failure. And then there was the tragic tragedy of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War of 1856-1853, where our boys raced to seemingly glorious or foolish deaths. As if for us Englishmen, sacrifice in vain and acceptance of defeat is the meaning of heroism. And our cinema has colluded with this deviation.
But there is one exception to this national celebration of failure. Britain has not been willing to accept its revolutionary defeats. For example, there are no films dealing with the Chartist movement's 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage. Even more interestingly, only now, in 2026, has a film been made about the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, even though it is an important event in British history. Paul Greengrass's The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield as a rebellious peasant - let's get this over with - joins a handful of other films, including Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollow's 1975 Winstanley. Bill Douglas's 1986 Comrades and Mike Leigh's 2018 Peterlow boldly show how radical collective action was suppressed by a ruthless government.
For Stephanie Barchowski, author of Heroic Failure and the British, our fetish for glorious tragedy is the result of 19th-century British private school ethos of stoic duty and S&M cryptographic suffering, drawn from an ancient Roman model. Revolutionary failure does not fit this pattern. Therefore, it can be assumed that it is absent in our cinema.
But Qiyam, for all its flaws and mistakes, is a bold attempt to right a national wrong by portraying a heroless collective uprising. Greengrass tries to understand how a mass movement of riff-raff emerged from the rough ends of Kent and Essex, and how its momentum was compromised by factionalism and conflicting aims. It shows how, in the end, the revolutionary leaders were tricked by King Richard II's son, and the rebels ended up either being slaughtered en masse in London's Smithfield or marching home to work harder to pay the poll tax they had revolted against in the first place against his injustice.
It's an important — if late, improbable and commercially dubious — addition to our national story.
In contrast, other countries have been more fortunate in their revolutionary heritage, and as a result their national cinemas are full of examples of successful uprisings. For example, since the advent of cinema, Americans have enjoyed endlessly making films about their War of Independence—including silent features such as 1917's The Spirit of 76 and DW Griffith's America (1924) and Bugs Bunny in Freeze Furlong's delightful period cartoon Bunker Hill Bunny (1950). The French have paid cinematic homage to their 1789 revolution, dating back to the 1913 biopic Robespierre.
In Russia, Grigory Alexandrov and Sergei Eisenstein's October 1928 showed how the success of the Bolshevik Revolution against the odds made the Russian spirit what it is. Films such as Michael Collins (1996), directed by Liam Neeson and Neil Jordan's The Wind Shakes Joe (2006), set during the Irish War of Independence and starring Cillian Murphy, capture the triumphs and tragedies of Ireland's revolutionary heritage – even if the latter has an English director in the form of Ken Loach.
But it is not just the deeply classist notion of heroic failure that has made British cinema reluctant to embrace our failed revolutionary heritage. This is a result of how our culture has been reverse colonized by Hollywood, with historical narratives deemed filmable only if they fit within the framework of the American film industry. Whenever Hollywood tends to make a film about British history, it involves Downton-style top-down hookah, those crime-crazed Tudors and, of course, that historical-code franchise that never stops giving, Robin Hood.
Equally, it is obvious in Hollywood that political struggles are always about one thing - an American concept of freedom, individual freedom from supposed tyranny. That's why Mel Gibson's Braveheart was possible in 1995: Although William Wallace's campaign against the British ended with his execution at Smithfield (not far from where Wat Tyler was killed by Richard II's servants), the biopic contained the classic Hollywood story of the little man who fought for freedom. Any other political goal (tax reform, redistribution of wealth, solidarity, fraternity) is rarely effective in Hollywood stories.
And that's what makes Greengrass Uprising problematic. Hollywood's compromise of values is at odds with its representation of a failed political revolution for what it was—a collective struggle. This film portrays the peasant revolt in the frame of a fictional man named Garfield the Plowman. Plowman, whom Greengrass envisions as representing all the people—with a disregard for historical truth that must have baffled the film's historical consultant Dan Jones—appears like Zelig to chat with the king, catch the eye of the king's mother, rally riots, kill bad guys, as if he were a real historical figure. Collective struggle turns into individual drama and betrays the position of the apostrophe - what happened in 1381 was a peasant revolt, not a peasant revolt.
To make matters worse, the film includes a very silly coda in which, a year after the defeat of his rebellion, Plowman and a group of rebels have retreated to Greenwood, England, to form an outlaw group of disaffected men. The upshot of this coda is to make the Peasants' Revolt a sort of source story for the Robin Hood legend, though that's nonsense: the folklore revolt - if at all - predates it by about 200 years. The whole idea may sound ludicrous, but The Uprising's US distributors, Focus Features, leaned into that bad interpretation earlier this year, renaming the film The Uprising: The Rise of Robin Hood, suggesting that the film depicts the events that "helped inspire the legend of Robin Hood". Of course, sensible Guardian readers will know that Robin Hood was a supporter of Richard I and an enemy of King John, both of whom ruled England nearly two centuries earlier.
Such absurdities are a great shame, because Gringress's intention—precious—was to make a film about a peasant revolt that resonated topically for our time. Collapsing trust in our rulers, a seemingly never-ending cost-of-living crisis, widening inequality, a political discourse dominated by lies and nonsense: 2026 is more like 2026 than we imagine.
It is worth noting that there was one successful military revolution in British history, the English Civil War. Cinema, of course, has failed to capture it: there was Ken Hughes' highly inaccurate 1970 drama Cromwell with Richard Harris and Alec Guinness and Mike Barker in 2003's To Kill a King with Tim Roth and Dougray Scott. But our most enduring and successful revolution was hardly cinematic: the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, in which the Catholic King James II was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary II and her Dutch husband William III of Orange, was hailed by Bertrand Russell as "the most moderate and successful of revolutions". yawn! Who wants to see that movie?
Perhaps the greatest film about Britain's revolutionary defeat was the aforementioned Winstanley, about a group of early communists called the Diggers who settled on common land on St George's Hill outside Weybridge, Surrey, during the English Civil War. They hoped to create a utopia free of private property and lived self-sufficiently for a few weeks before being violently evicted by the local gentry. To find out that the Diggers experiment has failed, just go to the property website Rightmove. There you'll find a stunning £25m mansion on Cavendish Road, St George's Hill with "views from driveways, seven individually themed bathrooms, two staff apartments, and a leisure complex" and 1.5 acres of meticulously landscaped gardens. Not at all what their leader Gerard Winstanley wanted. He wrote: "Was the earth made to preserve a few greedy and proud men to live in ease, and they save the earth's treasures from others, so that they may beg or starve in a fertile land, or was it made to preserve all its children?" Our radical history, often absent from our national cinema, is built on land in Surrey for real estate that hardly any of us can afford. A very British coup if ever there was one.