Flatland Color Revolution School

The Flatland Colour Revolt faction is the revolutionary movement that sought to make colour a universal means of recognition and to translate that new visual system into equal legal and political rights. Its programme challenged both the old hierarchy of geometric classes and the institutions that reproduced it; its defeat ended in the destruction of its mass base and a state-enforced return to colourlessness.

Origins and Programme

The movement emerged as colour recognition displaced older arts of identification and education. Sight Recognition fell out of practice, while geometry and related studies lost standing even at the University; the elementary art of Feeling also declined. Isosceles classes grew more numerous and more assertive as they escaped the customary contribution of the criminal classes to education. Soldiers and Artisans, meanwhile, argued that colour had enabled them to solve practical problems as effectively as the highest Polygons, weakening the case for aristocratic distinctions.

The faction turned that practical claim into a political demand. It called for laws against supposedly monopolizing arts and for the abolition of endowments supporting Sight Recognition, mathematics, and Feeling. Its next step was more sweeping: since colour appeared to have erased the distinctions on which rank rested, every class should be recognized as equal and entitled to equal rights. The proposed law would also require Women and Priests, who had no sides, to be painted. Their eye-and-mouth halves would be red and their rear halves green, making their orientation legible through the same chromatic scheme.

The proposal had a calculated appeal to Women. The colours assigned to them would match those assigned to Priests, so that in certain positions a Woman could appear priestly and receive comparable deference. The account attributes the plan not to an Isosceles but to an Irregular Circle, whom the narrator depicts as having been spared in childhood and later bringing disaster upon the country and his followers. Thus the movement's universalist legislation was also a tactical bid for support, designed to enlist a group excluded from the ordinary geometry of class recognition.

Escalation and Public Support

Agitation for the Universal Colour Bill lasted three years, during which the political balance remained uncertain. A Polygon army fighting as private soldiers was annihilated by a superior force of Isosceles Triangles, while Squares and Pentagons stayed neutral. In elite households, political conflict also became domestic violence: some Women, unable to persuade their husbands to support the Bill, killed their children and husbands and died in the same attacks. The account records twenty-three Circles killed amid this discord.

A public scandal then altered the movement's prospects. An Isosceles of low type, having obtained colours from a shop he had plundered, appeared painted in the twelve colours of a Dodecagon. In a feigned voice he approached a young woman, the orphan daughter of a noble Polygon whose affection he had previously sought without success. With deception, lucky accidents, and failures of precaution among her relatives, he succeeded in marrying her. When she discovered the fraud, she killed herself.

The news changed how Women regarded the Bill. Sympathy for the victim combined with fear that the same kind of deception might threaten them, their sisters, and their daughters; some openly turned against the proposal, and others were close to doing so. The Circles seized this shift in opinion, summoned an extraordinary Assembly of the States, and arranged for reactionary Women to attend alongside the usual guard of Convicts. The movement's former appeal to Women through the promise of priestly respect was now answered by a counterargument grounded in the danger of mistaken identity and fraudulent marriage.

Concession and Suppression

At the Assembly, Pantocyclus, the Chief Circle, faced the jeers of 120,000 Isosceles. He quieted them by announcing that the Circles would adopt a policy of concession and accept the Colour Bill. The change turned hostility into applause, and he invited Chromatistes, the movement's leader, into the centre of the hall to receive the hierarchy's submission. Pantocyclus then delivered a speech lasting nearly a day. Though he presented himself as impartial and said he would accept the Bill if the majority approved it, he led his listeners through the dangers he associated with reform.

He warned the Workmen that colour would extinguish distinctions on which their ambitions depended. Some, he said, were nearing admission to the Regular Triangles, while others hoped for distinction for their children; universal colour would sacrifice those prospects. In his account, it would confuse Regularity with Irregularity, halt social development, and eventually lower Workmen to the level of the military or convict classes. By arguing that the Criminal Classes already outnumbered the Workmen, he cast equal political power as the transfer of rule to a numerical majority hostile to the existing order. Artisans responded with subdued assent, and Chromatistes tried to answer but was surrounded by guards and silenced.

Pantocyclus then appealed to Women, predicting that the Bill would make marriage unsafe and expose every household to fraud, deception, and hypocrisy. His final words served as a prearranged signal. Isosceles Convicts attacked Chromatistes and killed him by stabbing. Regular classes opened their ranks to let Women approach the soldiers back foremost, so that they could advance unseen; Artisans followed the same manoeuvre. Convicts blocked every exit. The army of Isosceles, taken by surprise and deprived of its leader, found itself attacked by foes it could not see and trapped behind by the guards.

The fighting became a massacre. The Women’s charges were usually fatal, while those who survived could attack again; confusion among the Isosceles completed the destruction. When they cried treachery, each began to see and feel an enemy in every other. Within half an hour, not one of the vast crowd remained alive; the account describes 140,000 members of the Criminal Class slain by one another's angles. The narrator presents this outcome as the triumph of Order, a phrase that makes the restoration of hierarchy inseparable from mass killing.

Aftermath and Significance

The Circles followed victory with further purges. Working Men were spared but decimated. The militia of the Equilateral Triangles was mobilized, and any Triangle reasonably suspected of Irregularity could be destroyed by court martial without exact measurement by the Social Board. For more than a year, officials inspected military and artisan homes throughout towns, villages, and hamlets, removing what the ruling account described as an excess of the lower orders. These measures were said to restore the balance of classes.

Colour was abolished and its possession prohibited. Speaking any word that denoted colour became a serious offence, except for Circles and qualified scientific teachers. The narrator says that its restricted use may survive in the University's highest and most esoteric mathematical classes, but acknowledges that this is hearsay. Elsewhere the knowledge of making colour belongs to a single living person, the Chief Circle, who passes it to his successor on his deathbed. One factory produces it, and its workers are consumed each year and replaced to protect the secret.

The faction's defeat therefore did more than reverse a proposed law: it dismantled the public knowledge and institutions that might have supported the movement. Education had already been weakened when colour made older recognition skills seem unnecessary; after the revolt, access to the chromatic alternative was monopolized and its vocabulary criminalized. The narrator links the continuing terror of the Aristocracy to memories of the agitation, showing how the failed campaign remains a rationale for secrecy, coercion, and the preservation of class rule.