Chapter IX: Part 9

Our sixth variable is even more obviously than the others an abstraction, a presumably useful way of gathering together a great number of concrete facts. It is not logically on an exact level with our other variables, and would not fit into a nice series of philosophical categories. This is a variable based on observation of the behavior of the relatively small group of leaders formed during the revolution and now in control of the government of the Terror. Much of their behavior is affected, like the behavior of their followers and fellow-citizens, by the other variables in our list, and no doubt by much that has escaped us. But some very important elements in their behavior depend on the fact that they are leaders, that they have gone through a certain apprenticeship in revolutionary tactics, that they have been selected, almost in a Darwinian sense, for their ability to manipulate an extremist revolutionary group. This does not mean that they are necessarily or even usually “impractical” men, “theoreticians,” “metaphysicians,” or any other of the names simple critics like Taine invented for them. It does mean that they are not formed for compromise, for the dull expedients of politics in unexcited, relatively stable societies. It does mean that they are formed to push on to extremes, to use their special influence to heighten the already high tension of life in society. Like all politicians, they have learned the skills necessary for success in their trade; they have come to feel their trade is something like a game, as indeed it is; but they are reckless players, apt to play to the gallery, and always trying for a home run. No good revolutionary leader would ever bunt. Moreover, they are at least as jealous of one another as, to use another comparison, actors, and each one must always try for the center of the stage. What in more ordinary times has been lately no more than a conventional struggle for power among politicians is thus in the crisis period of revolutions stepped up to a murderous intensity.

Finally, there is the variable we have dwelt upon at length in an earlier part of this chapter. This is the element of religious faith shared by Independents, Jacobins, Bolsheviks. We need not here repeat what we have just written about the religious aspect of the Reigns of Terror. But it is this element that makes the Reigns of Terror also Reigns of Virtue, heroic attempts to close once for all the gap between human nature and human aspirations. This is but one of the variables, but it is a very important one. Religious aims and emotions help to differentiate the crises of our revolutions from ordinary military or economic crises, and to give to the Reigns of Terror and Virtue their extraordinary mixture of spiritual fury, of exaltation, of devotion and self-sacrifice, of cruelty, madness and high-grade humbug.

Now all these elements are in constant interaction one with another, a change in one effecting complex corresponding changes in all the others, and hence in the total situation. We must not think of them in terms of horse and cart, or chicken and egg, or of one billiard ball hitting another. It is instead as complicated and mad a chase as we conceive that of the molecules in a physico-chemical system. Thus the stresses and strains of the early stages of our revolutions make it easier to work the nation into war--witness the war-provoking Girondins in France--and the war itself increases the stresses, accustoms people to violence and suspense. War makes for economic scarcity and economic scarcity sharpens the class struggle, and so on in a merry round-robin. All these effects, up to the end of the crisis period, are cumulative. Each old habit sloughed off, each definite break with the past at once invites others and increases the strain upon everybody, or nearly everybody, in the social system.

For it would seem to be an observable fact of human behavior that large numbers of men can stand only so much interference with the routines and rituals of their daily existence. It would also seem that most men cannot long stand the strain of prolonged effort to live in accordance with very high ideals. The outsider in the crisis period is pushed to the limit of his endurance by interference with some of his most prized and intimate routines; the insider is held to a pitch of spiritual effort and excitement beyond his powers of endurance. For both sorts of men there would seem to be a limit to their social action as real as the limit a chemist finds for a chemical reaction. Human beings can go only so far and so long under the stimulus of an ideal. Social systems composed of human beings can endure for but a limited time the concerted attempt to bring heaven to earth which we call the Reign of Terror and Virtue. Thermidor comes as naturally to societies in revolution as an ebbing tide, as calm after a storm, as convalescence after fever, as the snapping-back of a stretched elastic band. Such figures of speech, taken from established uniformities in the physical world, seem to impose themselves. Perhaps, in spite of the efforts of philosophers, theologians, moralists, political theorists, social scientists, and a good many other inspired thinkers in the last two thousand years, social systems are still almost as perversely unaffected by revolutionary good intentions as tides or rubber bands.

_Chapter_ EIGHT THERMIDOR

_I. Universality of the Thermidorean Reaction_

As we have had to note in earlier attempts to fit our four revolutions into our conceptual scheme, this fitting cannot be done with finicky exactness. It is quite impossible to say that the crisis of a given revolution ended at 4:03 P.M. on August 6th of a given year. France does indeed furnish us with an instance almost as precise as this. The end of the crisis in France may be dated from the fall of Robespierre on July 27, 1794, or on the ninth Thermidor, year II of the poetic new French calendar. The ensuing slow and uneven return to quieter, less heroic times has long been known to French historians as the Thermidorean reaction. The Marxists, and especially the Trotskyites, have recently been applying the word to the Russian revolution, so that we may adopt it, as we did “old regime,” as a term in general acceptance. All our revolutions had their Thermidors, though in no two were the sequence of events, the time schedules, the ups and downs of daily life, anything like identical.

In terms of our conceptual scheme, we shall have to call Thermidor a convalescence from the fever of revolution, even though “convalescence” suggests something nice, and seems therefore to be a way of praising the Thermidorean reaction. We can but repeat previous assertions that no such eulogistic sense is here intended. We continue to try to discover first approximations of uniformities in phenomena we mean neither to praise nor to blame, neither to cherish nor to damn.

In England the beginning of the Thermidorean period, the convalescence, is not to be put with any preciseness. The year or so following the execution of Charles I represents the height of the crisis in England, and as long as the Rump sat some strong flavor of revolution remained. Perhaps the best date for the English Thermidor is Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump on April 20, 1653, when the great general made some celebrated and un-English remarks about the resemblance between the mace and a jester’s staff. With Cromwell installed as Protector under the “instrument of Government” of 1653--the English actually did indulge themselves once in a written constitution--Thermidor may be said to be well on its way. In 1657 Cromwell became Lord Protector, half a king at least, and with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 the great English revolution may be said to end.

The fall of Robespierre in France had been brought about largely by a conspiracy among outwardly orthodox Jacobin deputies to the Convention, men for the most part seriously involved in war-profiteering, parliamentary corruption, stock speculation and other activities unworthy of citizens of the Republic of Virtue. Fear of the “Incorruptible” Robespierre seems to have been one of the main reasons for their action. They were successful, not unaided by Robespierre’s lack of political wisdom. The Thermidoreans themselves had apparently not intended to end the Terror; the guillotining of Robespierre was just another in a long list of revolutionary guillotinings to which they had now become well accustomed. But for once public opinion got to work, and Frenchmen made it clear that they were through with the “tigers athirst for blood.” The reaction continued at a fairly steady rate for some years, both under the declining Convention and the new government of the Directory. There were definite relapses, as one might expect in a convalescence. Especially in the summer of 1799, after French defeats abroad, there was a striking revival of Jacobinism. The clubs re-opened, and the good old slogans resounded once more in public halls, in cafes, and on street corners. A few months later Napoleon Bonaparte had achieved his _coup d’état_ of the 18th Brumaire, and the French convalescence was nearly over. The actual restoration of the Bourbons in 1814 is hardly a part of the course of revolution in France. It was rather an accident, a consequence of such purely personal factors as Napoleon’s megalomaniac insistence on fighting all Europe to the bitter end in 1813-14, Talleyrand’s knack for calling the turn, and the good intentions of Alexander I of Russia.

The Russian revolution may perhaps in a sense be still going on. The Trotskyites hold that Stalin and his crowd are Thermidoreans, and that _this_ Russian revolution, at any rate, is pretty well over. Complete detachment in such matters is certainly difficult at this moment. But it does seem clear that the crisis period in Russia is over, that at most Russia is now in a rather long and disturbed convalescence from the fever of revolution. We may perhaps regard the period of war communism, 1917-21, as the first and main crisis of the Russian revolution. With the New Economic Policy of 1921 began Russia’s Thermidor. Lenin’s death and the subsequent rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky led up to a second crisis, or rather relapse during convalescence, which we may date at the more acute periods of violent enforcement of the first Five Year Plan. But as many an observer has noted, this secondary crisis lacked the hopeful idealism of the first, lacked its improvisations and its adventures, lacked its active foreign and White Guard enemies, and looks from even our brief historical perspective much like characteristic acts of the “tyrants” who came to power during other Thermidors--the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, for instance, or the Napoleonic enforcement of the Continental System. Since 1933, this second crisis has been rapidly abating, and at present evidences of reaction in Russia abound.

_II. Amnesty and Repression_

Politically the most striking uniformity to be noted in the period of convalescence is the ultimate establishment of a “tyrant” in something like the old Greek sense of the word, an unconstitutional ruler brought to power by revolution or _stasis_. This uniformity has been frequently noted: Cromwell, Bonaparte, Stalin, all seem to confirm it. Indeed, in the Federalist period in the United States there were Jeffersonians ungrateful enough to suggest that Washington was a perfectly good example of the tyrant born of revolution. There is nothing very puzzling about the phenomenon. After a revolution has undergone the crisis and the accompanying centralization of power, some strong leader must handle that centralized power when the mad religious energy of the crisis period has burned itself out. Dictatorships and revolutions are inevitably closely associated, because revolutions to a certain extent break down, or at least weaken, laws, customs, habits, beliefs which bind men together in society; and when laws, customs, habits, beliefs tie men together insufficiently, force must be used to remedy that insufficiency. Military force is for short terms the most efficient kind of force available for social and political uses, and military force demands a hierarchy of obedience culminating in a generalissimo. Polybius has here some appropriate remarks about the military virtues of Republican Rome. All this, however, is pretty much a commonplace of our times.

The rule of one man does not come immediately with the Thermidorean reaction. Even Cromwell, the earliest established of the three, did not become uncontested ruler with the dissolution of the Rump. The reaction to the crisis is at first slow and uncertain. The habit of violence is by now thoroughly established. There is left from the crisis a tendency to dramatic steps and whole-hog measures. Even sober and peace-loving men have moments of excited relapses to the jitters of the Terror. Seen in this light, the recent Moscow purges and trials are no indication that the Russian revolution has had an unusually long life, that it fails to fit our pattern. These melodramatic displays are no more than the expected aftermath of revolution in a land and among peoples unblessed with Magna Carta, Blackstone, and Gilbert and Sullivan.

As time goes on, the pressures the Terror applied to ordinary men are relaxed: the special tribunals give place to more regular ones, the revolutionary police are absorbed into the regular police--which are not necessarily the equivalent of London bobbies; they may be agents of the OGPU--and the block, guillotine or firing-squad are reserved for the more dramatic criminals. It is not, of course, that political life shortly assumes the idyllic stability some of our own contemporaries like to describe as the Rule of Law, and which, one suspects, was never quite as nice as appears in their books--not even in staid nineteenth-century England, or in the thirteenth century where St. Thomas lived so pleasantly. The taste and habit of political violence lives on in _coups d’état_, in purges, in well-staged trials. But John Jones, Jacques Duval, Ivan Ivanovich, the man in the street, is no longer included in the cast--he is now left to his normal role of spectator or supernumerary.

Gradually, too, the politically proscribed are amnestied, and come back, sometimes to be caught up again in the scramble of competitive politics; sometimes to become part of that staff of modern life, the bureaucracy; sometimes to live quietly as private citizens. The process is naturally the reverse of the process in which these men and women had been driven out. They go from Right to Left, and come back from Left to Right--first the almost pure radicals, then the moderates, then moderate conservatives, until the final restoration brings back remnants of the old gang. Such at least was the process in France and in England. After 1653, the Presbyterians took heart and began to emerge into politics, followed by the more moderate Episcopalians and Royalists, until in 1660 the Stuarts and their courtiers returned. In France the succession was very exact and ratified by formal bills of amnesty: first the Girondins--those who had survived--came back, while tears were shed over, and monuments erected to, the innocent victims of the bloodthirsty tiger Robespierre; then the Feuillants, the Lafayette-Lameth crowd; then the out-and-out Royalists and such-like _émigrés_, whom Napoleon, however, was able to control fairly well; then finally, in 1814, the Bourbons themselves.

So far the Romanovs have not returned to Russia, and only a very rash prophet would prophesy their ultimate return, or indeed any kind of formal restoration of hereditary monarchy. We must not ask our revolutions to make too neat a picture. It is clear, however, that save for the final monarchical restoration, the process we have outlined above has been going on slowly in Russia, at least since Lenin’s death. Even the aristocrats can go back if they make the proper submission and get the proper publicity--which was true of Napoleonic France. As for the numerous variants of revolutionary belief, it is clear that gathered around Stalin today are many men who were far from orthodox in 1917. Even the sainted Gorki was what in France would be called a _rallié_, a man who rallied to the Communist regime only after the worst of the Terror was safely over. On the other hand, almost all the old Bolsheviks, the men who ruled Russia in the period of crisis, have by now been liquidated. Stalin in 1938 can hardly make any direct human contact with his revolutionary past.

The personnel of government in the Thermidorean period and in the new-old regime that finally emerges from the revolution is likely to be varied in origin. Napoleon was served by old aristocrats of the _noblesse d’épée_, by bureaucrats trained in the old regime, by Fayettists, by Girondins and even by a few once-violent Jacobins. Of men like Albemarle, Shaftesbury, and Downing, who stood high in the government of Charles II after his restoration, it has been written: “They were of the same school as Blake and Vane; they represented the most solid political attainments of the Cromwellian party.” Downing’s career is an especially good example of how men of ability and a certain moral elasticity can traverse revolutions. He was graduated from Harvard in 1642, and went to England at the happy moment of Puritan supremacy. He soon rose high in the ranks of the Cromwellians, devoting his talents especially to diplomacy. He contrived to turn his coat at just the right time, and was accepted in the service of the new king. It is from this early and somewhat atypical Harvard man that Downing Street in London takes its name. Even in Russia, though by now old Bolsheviks are almost completely weeded out of the very highest councils, there are undoubtedly many of them, their fires well banked, in the great new bureaucracy.

The new governing classes in all our societies are then a very miscellaneous lot, with very little in common as regards social origins, education, and earlier party affiliations. They have in common a certain adaptability. They have survived a rigorous if somewhat arbitrary selection. They seem, after the heroes of the Terror, tame and unenterprising in many ways. But they usually do a pretty good job in getting institutions, laws, routines, all the necessary standard ways of doing things, once more working.

Along with amnesty to former moderates there goes on a reverse process of repression and persecution of unrepentant revolutionists of all sorts. The further the reaction moves to the Right, the wider its definition of revolutionists to be duly restrained as suitable reaction against the honors of the Reign of Terror. The Thermidoreans themselves are by no means unwilling to apply terroristic methods in the proper direction. The White Terrors are as real as the Red. Even in England, the well-known Clarendon Code of the Restoration conforms closely enough to the general pattern of repression later carried out in France and in Russia. The clever and unprincipled extremist is almost always able to weather the White Terror--witness Fouché again. It is only the convinced and persistent extremists who suffer.

As for the more active and violent leaders of the original Terror, they are of course eliminated, either by exile or by death. They are now declared to have been fanatics, villains, bloodthirsty tyrants, scoundrels. They become very convenient scapegoats, explanations of the difficulties the new regime has getting things settled. If there is one very dramatic scapegoat, and he is already dead, so much the better. Cromwell’s body was dug up after the Stuart Restoration and hanged at Tyburn, along with Ireton’s and Bradshaw’s. He became a tyrant, an ogre, a blasphemer, and so remained on the whole until in the nineteenth century Carlyle started the rehabilitation which has made him a hero. Except for a small sect led by the late Albert Mathiez, Robespierre has never recovered the status of hero. The Thermidoreans made Robespierre a prime scapegoat, the leader of the gang of terrorists, a vain and capricious tyrant, a bloody villain. Lenin, of course, died a saint, but fortunately for Stalin Trotsky made a grand scapegoat. Recent events have shown that in this respect Russia is still in its Thermidorean period, and the process of finding big and little scapegoats seems to be going on merrily in that country.

The lift of the ideal has gone by now. The new ruling class settles down to do as good a job as it can. But it clearly intends also to enjoy life, to possess the privileges and wealth a ruling class has hitherto always had. This new ruling class is certainly not going to try to achieve Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for everyone in the society. It is quite content with the stratification which has worked itself out during the revolution. It will settle its own internal conflicts as far as it can, in the traditional way of ruling classes. There will be none of the dangerous direct appeals to the people, no risks of great popular uprisings. We have already noted how as the crisis period approaches the people come less and less into active politics, how the extremists reach power through what is no more than a _coup d’état_. With the Thermidoreans this process continues, until the political changes, the transfers of power during this period--and they are numerous, and by no means altogether regular and orderly--are hardly more than palace revolutions. When all is quiet and safe the victors will risk a plebiscite. Appearances have to be kept up, and a certain number of stereotypes about the will of the people have by now got fairly well established in the mind of John Jones.

John Jones may well be somewhat tired of political turmoil. But he is certainly not in the Thermidorean period in a generally prosperous condition. One of the most striking uniformities we can discern in this period is that, notably in France and Russia, but to a certain extent also in the England of the 1650’s and the America of the Articles of Confederation, there was more widespread economic suffering, especially among the poorest classes, than during the Terror, or during the last years of the old regime. When the Thermidoreans in France abandoned price-fixing and food-rationing, prices rocketed, paper money went on its classic decline, and the poor were left in a very bad way. There seems to be a general agreement that there was more actual suffering in France in the winters of 1795 and 1796 than at any other time in the revolutionary era. Yet save for a few pathetic bread riots at Paris and in some of the large cities, riots easily put down by the government, nothing happened. Similarly in Russia, there seems to be no doubt that the liquidation of the _kulaks_ and the great famine during the first Five Year Plan brought a greater toll of death and misery than even the period of war communism. Possibly the explanation of the failure of this suffering to produce a rising is that suffering is not in itself a spur to effective revolt; perhaps it is merely that the new ruling class in Thermidor can and does use force with an effectiveness the old ruling class did not command; perhaps it is also that by Thermidor the great mass of people neither rich nor poor, not at any rate quite on the margin of existence, is worn out, exhausted, fed up with the experiences of the crusade for the Republic of Virtue.

The lift of the ideal has also gone out of the wars the revolutionists have been waging to spread their gospel. It is doubtless true that these wars were never wholly devoted to the spreading of this gospel, and certainly the catchwords of the gospel continue to be used long after the heroic period of the crisis. But aggressive nationalism gradually supplants the missionary spirit, a Messianic crusade gradually becomes clearly a war of conquest. Cromwell turned English energies to the reconquest of Ireland and then to the re-establishment of English prestige abroad. The seizure of Jamaica is a little thing if compared with Napoleon’s conquests, but it is cut from the same sociological pattern. With Sexby and Blake in earlier years, patriotism had taken the form of wishing to make all Europe republican; by the middle of the decade of the fifties, English patriotism had returned to more normal channels. That under the Directory and Napoleon French nationalism conformed to the pattern we have sketched above should be clear even to the idolaters of Napoleon.

In Russia in the early days of the revolution nationalism in the aggressive sense was virtuously abandoned according to the best tenets of Marx; in the purely cultural sense nationalism became the prized basis of soviet federalism. To many admirers of the Russian revolution it will not be at all clear that Russia has also conformed to our pattern, has fitted in with the uniformity by which Messianic revolutionary proselyting in other lands becomes the aggressive nationalism with which we are familiar. The skeptical can only reply that the boasted federal equality of the national groups within the Soviet Union has not proved incompatible with practical domination by the Great Russians, though unquestionably the Soviet government has been in most respects more “liberal” towards the other national groups than was Czarist Russia, and more successful in integrating them into the larger unity of the U.S.S.R. But more important for our purposes is the clear reappearance of ordinary nationalism in Stalin’s Russia. This has not yet taken the aggressive forms French nationalism took under Napoleon, largely because the present international situation of Russia is very different from that of France at the end of the eighteenth century. But evidence of the existence of a strong national spirit in contemporary Russia is abundant; it can be found in the abandonment of the attempt to foment revolution in other countries, and a return to the policy of nationalistic alliances, in the deliberate encouragement of the patriotic study of Russian history, in the tone of the Russian press, in all phases of Russian cultural life. Of course the nice Marxist internationalist slogans are still repeated. Napoleon, “Child and Champion of Jacobinism,” also made abundant and effective use even of such compromising revolutionary terms as “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” But he did not fool all his contemporaries, and he certainly ought not to fool historians.

_III. Return of the Church_

The position of the recognized religions of the old regimes is one of the very best indicators of the nature and extent of these Thermidorean reactions. We saw in the last chapter that the extremists had developed what we had to call a religion of their own, an active, crusading, intolerant faith that sent its devotees storming the gates of heaven on earth. Naturally enough during their supremacy the extremists persecuted the old established faiths, Catholic and Protestant alike. The English Independents persecuted papists, prelatists, and Presbyterians with a zeal perhaps diminishing in that order. In France the Catholic Church had been long a target for the _philosophes_. The victorious Jacobins were not altogether of one mind either as to the treatment of the Catholic Church or as to just what sort of substitute might be desirable. Cults of Reason, of the Fatherland, of the Supreme Being, all had their advocates. Most of them could agree on banning the non-juring Catholics who were loyal to the Pope. At the height of the Terror the most violent “dechristianizers” had their way in some regions, destroying or defacing churches, guillotining or banishing priests, staging burlesques of Catholic ceremonials. Fouché at Nevers caused to be inscribed over the gate of the cemetery the confident assertion: _Death is an eternal Sleep_.

The Bolsheviks were brought up in a hatred for the Greek Orthodox Church at least as violent as that which the Jacobins felt for the Roman Catholic. They had a firm belief, nourished by much repetition, that religion is “the opium of the people.” They thought of themselves as men of science and hence atheists. Once in power the Bolsheviks began an active campaign against the churches, though especially in the early days of war communism they had a good deal else to do, and left the clergy to struggle along by itself. There were the usual acts of violence against persons of the clergy and against the church buildings, shutting of the monasteries, and so on. Priests were of course classed in the non-productive group, and suffered more than other men from lack of food during the great scarcity. Yet one gets the impression that in Russia sheer terrorism directed against organized Christianity was not quite as intense as it had been in France. The Bolsheviks had a great belief in the power of proper education, and planned from the first a state monopoly which should insure the young against exposure to the danger of infection with Christian notions. For adults the government trusted in anti-religious propaganda, in museums exposing the fakes and horrors of the old religion, and in the general spread of enlightenment and desire for the good things of this world. The “League of the Militant Godless” was formed with government support, the presses and the artists got to work on posters, the newspapers went enthusiastically into this relatively safe pursuit, and for a while in the 1920’s foreign observers might not unreasonably report that Christianity in Russia seemed well on the way to extinction.

No such confident conclusion seems safe in 1938. It is very difficult indeed to get trustworthy information on the present status of organized Christianity in Russia. On this subject, even more than on most subjects, Westerners traveling in Russia find what they want to find. But it does seem definitely established that now after twenty years of Bolshevik supremacy Christianity has not been wiped out in Russia, is not even limited to older people brought up before the revolution. The League of the Militant Godless announced in 1930 that the government had closed only 3,380 out of the 50,000 churches of Czarist Russia. At the tenth anniversary meeting of the League, the president stated that 50 per cent of Russian youth were still Christian. In 1936 the League complained that priests in various parts of Russia have cleverly adapted themselves to Communism, have insinuated themselves into the collective farms, have taken to appearing at trade-union meetings. A recent Catholic traveler reported in the Commonweal that in a conducted tour he was not shown any of the famous “atheist museums” and that on inquiry he found that the whole business of anti-Christian propaganda was being very much soft-pedaled.

On every hand one finds bits of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: under the Thermidorean rule of Stalin, the Orthodox Church is gradually coming back into a recognized and secure position in Russian life. This is not to say that the Militant Godless are not still active, nor that they will in their turn find themselves persecuted. Nor is it to assert that the Orthodox Church is today exactly what it was in the days of the Czars. On the contrary, it is evident that its clergy, once known for their conservatism and inaction, have been stirred to a real effort of adaptation to new circumstances. But it does mean that the rites of the church still go on in a Russia no longer perhaps exactly the Holy Russia of old, but by no means cut off from an institution identified with a thousand years of her history.

In France the reconciliation of the Thermidoreans and the old church went on so rapidly that within less than a decade from the “dechristianizing” movement of the Terror Napoleon could sign a Concordat with the Pope which officially re-established Roman Catholicism as the State Church of France. During the worst of the Terror, Catholics in France had had to hold their services in secret, in spite of the fact that freedom of worship was guaranteed by law. With the fall of Robespierre they began to risk public services in the buildings still spared them. As more and more moderates were amnestied, the government became more and more friendly, and the last four years of the eighteenth century saw France with complete religious freedom and with almost complete separation of Church and State. Napoleon and many of the new ruling class felt the need of winning the Catholics over completely, and the formal Concordat was negotiated. The re-established Catholic Church was not, however, in exactly the same legal position as under the old regime, when it had been the sole recognized faith. Protestants and Jews were by the new laws given equal status with the Catholics.

Organized Christianity does not enter in the same way into the American revolution. In England, however, there is a striking similarity to the broad lines of development in France and Russia. The established faith of the old regime was the Church of England, in many ways, liturgically, theologically, governmentally, not very far removed from the Catholic tradition. The new revolutionary faith was Calvinism in its various forms, of which the Independent finally triumphed. Under Independent rule the Anglican worship, and indeed rival forms of Calvinist worship, were kept down. On paper, at least, this religious persecution was even more violent than that in France and in Russia. The disputants in the pamphlet warfare among the sects were learned men with abundant vocabularies and firm convictions. On the other hand, save in Ireland, there was rather less violence and bloodshed in immediately religious quarrels during the English revolution than in those of France and Russia. With the repressing of the more radical sects, and especially the Quakers, the swing back begins in England. In the later years of Cromwell Presbyterians and even Anglicans reasserted themselves in public life and carried on their religious services in virtual freedom. When Charles II came back the Church of England was re-established in very nearly its old prestige and privileges, and the cycle took its usual form with the persecution of the sects that had made the revolution.

The history of the accepted religious faiths of the old regimes is then one of the very clearest uniformities our study of revolutions affords. One might almost make a graph, in which the prestige of the old organized faith might be seen to follow a fairly regular curve, lowest at the worst of the Terror, gradually climbing back during the Thermidorean reaction to a position almost as high as that from which it had started in the old regime. Such a graph would be deceptively simple, especially if its interpretation involved the notion that the restored church was exactly its old self once more. Neither men nor institutions pass through the crisis of revolution unchanged. The priests who had undergone persecution were never afterwards the same men who had once enjoyed the security of the old regime, any more than the _émigrés_ who returned from exile were the same men who had once been unchallenged members of a ruling class. We shall later consider the transformation of institutions apparently restored after the revolution. Here we may say a word about the _émigré_ priests, nobles, rich men, whose return to public life is one of the characteristic phenomena of Thermidor.

It would be most satisfying morally to conclude that the old clergy return purified and strengthened by the test of persecution and exile, that the old rulers return chastened and wise. But no such conclusion seems possible. There are exceptions, like the Duc de Richelieu, who had learned moderation and the art of ruling men during his long exile in Russia, and who returned to serve Louis XVIII faithfully but well. In general, however, the religious as well as the moral and political sentiments and ideas of the _émigrés_ are narrowed, intensified, strained into complete unpliability by the bitterness of their lot. The Catholicism of Joseph de Maistre has a rigidity and harshness not common in the faith into which he had grown up during the old regime.

For only in the world of the Alger books is adversity always a good teacher. In the world into which the English Royalists, the French and Russian _émigrés_, were thrust, adversity on the whole taught romantic and unquestioning acceptance of loyalties which they thought were old, but which were really new and high-powered abstractions drawn from their recent experiences in the arena. They returned having forgotten much and having learned a great deal--mostly knowledge neither useful nor realistic. This whole subject of what happens to the _émigrés_ and to the defeated, cowed moderates, is a fascinating one, and one which deserves to be further studied by competent persons. In spite of much good research at the level of narrative history, it remains one of the most obscure parts of the sociology of revolution. But in any case the returned _émigrés_ do not have the field to themselves, do not by any means determine the final course of the reaction to the revolution. Even in England in 1660 and in France in 1814, the more extreme among the returned _émigrés_ did not get things done as they wanted them. The Downings and the Albemarles, the Talleyrands and the Fouchés, the men on the scene, had got much too far ahead of them.

_IV. The Search for Pleasure_

The full flavor of the Thermidorean reaction is reserved for the social historian. In the dress, amusements, in the petty details of the daily lives of ordinary men and women, the full extent of the popular abandonment of the Republic of Virtue becomes clear. So marked is this let-down that even the historian feels it, and most nineteenth-century liberal historians hardly concealed their disgust and disappointment when they came to record the indecent pleasures of the English Restoration or of the French Directory. The austerities of the good life according to Calvin or Robespierre seemed a noble standard, a goal towards which men might struggle with a heroism that adorns a work of history. The doings of a society in which a Nell Gwyn or a Teresa de Cabarrus were apparently the most important actors could hardly be edifying to anybody, and could be made instructive only with the addition of proper sermonizing. Scandal writers, romantic biographers, and other purveyors to a corrupt public taste have of course fallen with delight on the ripe tidbits of the Thermidors, but the high-minded men who write serious history have passed by these periods holding their hands to their noses. From one source or another, however, we can find what we need to know about the social history of our societies in this particular phase of revolution. We shall try to avoid being shocked or titillated, and to see how the obvious moral looseness of the Thermidorean reactions fits in with the uniformities we have been working out. But first for a brief review of the facts.

Within a few days of the guillotining of Robespierre and his more conspicuous followers Parisians began to indulge publicly and with gusto in a whole series of pleasures denied them during the tension of the Terror. Politicians may have thought that “Terror will not cease to be the order of the day until the last enemies of the Republic have perished,” but ordinary men and women for once imposed their obvious wants and needs directly on the politicians. One gets the impression that few phenomena in the course of the French revolution were more genuinely “popular” and “spontaneous” than the revulsion from the restraints of the Terror. The people of Paris took Robespierre’s death as a signal that the lid was off.

Dance halls were opened up all over Paris, prostitutes began operating “with their former audacity” (to quote a police report), well-dressed prosperous young men most unrepublicanly drunk began running about and cracking dour, virtuous Republicans over the head. These young men were the famous _jeunesse dorée_, a gilded youth with no illusions about a Republic of Virtue, and which would nowadays certainly be labeled Fascist at once. Both male and female costume had during the crisis period tended towards sobriety, the women being wrapped in flowing Roman robes and in more than Roman virtue. Now all was changed. The men’s clothes became extremely foppish, with tight trousers, elaborate waistcoats, and stocks that mounted beyond the chin. The women’s dressmakers were still classically inspired, but with a sure erotic sense they concentrated their efforts on the skillful revealing of the breasts. The _costume directoire_ is an excellent symbol of the period.

With the abandonment of price-fixing and in the inflation which followed, a class of newly rich speculators, war profiteers and clever politicians arose. Parliamentary scandals do indeed crop up in earlier periods of the revolutions, even in the crisis period. Corruption can be pretty well proved for certain members of the English Long Parliament and the French Convention even in their great days. But in these earlier periods exposure was followed by swift and sure punishment. Now, in Thermidor, no one seems to care very much and certainly nothing is done. There is gossip, and in some quarters indignation. But mostly politicians who grafted successfully were admired, as they later were to be in the United States.

Still jittery over the Terror, fearing its return, uncertain of their wealth and position, often quite uneducated in the patrician arts, the Thermidoreans spent their money freely and vulgarly. They gambled, they raced horses and fought cocks, they were mad about dancing. All this they did noisily and with little regard for the traditional decencies of the eighteenth century. In these short years the real basis for the romantic taste of nineteenth-century France was laid. The ladies of the period are famous for their gaiety and abandon. Their leader was Teresia de Cabarrus, once mistress of the corrupt representative Tallien, and now his wife. She was universally known, in a phrase that displays the cynicism of the age, as “Our Lady of Thermidor.”

All of us know the age of Charles II as an extreme reaction from the rule of the Saints. Restoration drama has, especially since Victorian times, been a symbol for naughtiness, for the kind of play no nice person could witness without blushing. Nell Gwyn has, in the national memory, ruled in triumph over a court life in which vice was as aristocratic as the most virtuous commoner could wish and suspect it to be. As a matter of fact, the Puritan code of manners and morals was never perfectly established, even in the years immediately following the death of Charles I. The less public pleasures were always possible, and prohibitions against horse-racing, bear-baiting, Christmas and other heathen festivals were subject to the same kind of nullification the Eighteenth Amendment received in this country. The very harshness of some of the Puritan prohibitions was in itself an indication that the Puritans were having a hard time getting all Englishmen to behave in such a way that they would not “stink in the nostrils of the just.”

Yet the Puritan rule was in fact harsh and rigid enough to give non-Puritans plenty of grievances, and in its main lines the Thermidorean reaction was as real in England as it was to be in France. There was not in England the same mixture of _parvenus_ and tired and lucky aristocrats as in France, and esthetically speaking the reaction in England was on a much higher lever than that in France. But in the frank return to the pleasures of the senses, to gambling, drinking, dancing, open love-making, to a light and cynical literature, to a frank joy in clothes and other vanities, the two countries present a very close parallel. Nor was the English Restoration altogether without a lushness of taste which chaster souls find offensive. Especially in female costume the contrast to the sobrieties of the early period is very striking. The ladies wore dresses of riotous and often conflicting colors, put on towering lace headdresses, fantastic patches and generous cosmetics on their faces, wore and displayed elaborately brocaded petticoats.

We need hardly labor this point about the loosening of moral restraints in the Thermidorean period in England and in France. We shall have to be more careful in establishing the facts about any such loosening of moral restraints in Soviet Russia. Here the facts are certainly not yet clear in the histories. Kindly and not very earthy souls like the Webbs see in Russia today an orderly society, half-workshop and half-nursery. Disillusioned radicals like Mr. Eugene Lyons see most of the major public sins of capitalistic countries magnified among the bureaucrats of Stalin’s gang, and the minor private vices, especially those of ostentation and comfort-seeking, at least as common among these bureaucrats as among our own corrupt middle classes. It does seem reasonably clear that no such striking and rapid shift from the public pursuit of virtue to the public pursuit of pleasure has taken place in Russia as took place in France and in England. But again we must not expect our uniformities to be suspiciously exact. In its broad lines, the Russian Thermidor runs as true to form morally and socially as we have seen it does politically.

In the first place, Thermidor in Russia began in Lenin’s own lifetime, with the coming of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Private property and private trading were once more permitted in Russia. The new class of entrepreneurs who rose out of this situation, the Nepmen, remind one forcibly of the similar class of profiteers who rose in France out of the abandonment of price-fixing after the fall of Robespierre. They were never quite sure of their status, and they carried over into their now legal activities a good many of the habits they had acquired in their bootlegging days under the Terror. As a class, they were “exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy.” In the next few years prostitution, gambling, and other un-Marxist pleasures returned so obviously to Moscow and Leningrad that only the most convinced of “fellow-travelers” were unable to see them. Most foreigners in Russia since 1917 have perhaps been prevented from what we may hopefully call the normal use of their eyesight less by the activities of Communist officials entrusted with the task of guiding foreigners than by their own strong religious conviction that all must be well in the Marxist heaven. Yet until the Five Year Plan was initiated, the return of the bourgeois vices was so obvious, especially in the middle twenties, that even foreign Communists noticed the fact.

Stalin’s apparent return to Communism in 1928-29 is really no more significant than Napoleon’s apparent repudiation of the corruptness and moral looseness of the Directory once he had achieved secure power by the _coup d’état_ of the 18th Brumaire. There seems to be in all our societies a certain reaction to the Thermidorean reaction, notably in this matter of the public pursuit of pleasure. Men in great numbers can no more devote themselves heroically and permanently to sin than to holiness. The thousand dance halls said to have been opened up in Paris immediately after the Terror could have kept going profitably only if most of the population of Paris wanted to dance most of the time. And in spite of Anglo-Saxon ideas to the contrary, Parisians are really not built that way.

What happens in the years following the crisis of the Terror is a kind of seesaw between moral restraint and moral looseness, at the end of which a kind of equilibrium is arrived at in which most men and women behave in respect to such matters as gambling, drinking, love-making, the adornment of their persons, and the use of leisure, about the way their grandfathers and grandmothers had behaved. If we look at Stalin’s Russia and ask ourselves how far there seems to be opportunity for the old Adam and the old Eve to come out in the lives of Russians we shall get a more accurate measure of the reality of Thermidor in Russia than we could get from any amount of Marxist or anti-Marxist theorizing.

Mr. Eugene Lyons tells with malicious delight the story of the bafflement and anger of a correspondent of the New York Jewish _Freiheit_, a Communist paper, when he was excluded from a government reception in Russia because he did not have a dinner jacket. Dinner jackets a part of the dictatorship of the proletariat! Nothing could be more absurd, illogical and wholly natural. The dinner jacket satisfies a number of human needs--the anthropologist could analyze most of them for you--and there seems to be no evidence that any of our revolutions had much long-run effect on these needs. A commissar needs a dinner jacket at least as much as a Congressman or a D.A.R. lecturer.

Detail after detail might be brought forward to show how the dictatorship of the proletariat in contemporary Russia is by no means the dictatorship of virtue we have seen prevailing in the crisis periods of our revolutions. Jazz, for instance, was long prohibited in Russia. Jazz was clearly the product of a decadent bourgeois civilization, an indecent way of stimulating what no good Marxist would want, or need, to have stimulated, one of the protean forms of “opium for the people” in capitalistic countries. Communists would dance from sheer joy to innocent, spring-like music. In the late twenties, however, the fox-trot and similar dances began to seep into Communist Russia, and nowadays we are told that American dance music is played as frequently and as badly in Russia as in the rest of Europe.

No one dramatic event like the fall of Robespierre can be used to date Thermidor in Russia. But a whole series of little matters of daily life combine to make an impressive case for the reality of the Russian reaction. A youth leader appears at a national youth congress in a necktie, a step which when first taken must have been as shocking as would be in this country the appearance of a Commencement speaker in overalls. A fashion show is held in Moscow, and mannequins actually parade, gliding and smiling with conventional lack of abandon, almost as if they were poor little wage-slaves in Paris or New York. Lipsticks and other cosmetics begin to appear even in the shops patronized by working girls. Stories of crime, “human interest” stories, begin to appear in the pages of newspapers hitherto superior to such capitalistic drivel, and hitherto consecrated to the pure heights of politics. Movies are made in which are to be seen recognizable human beings, insignificant, comic, stupid, jealous, even Russian, rather than bloodless abstractions representing Capitalism, the Landlord, Communism, the Proletariat, Man in Revolt.

The Bolsheviks had been very superior about the family. It was an institution of the old regime, interwoven with all sorts of religious elements, inevitably conservative in its social action. The family was a stuffy little nest breeding selfishness, jealousy, love of property, indifference towards the great needs of society. The family kept the young indoctrinated with the stupidities of the old. The Bolsheviks would break up the family, encourage divorce, educate the children to the true selflessness of Communism, get them used to collective enterprises and collective social life, get rid of the influence of the church in family relations. Now there seems to be no doubt that in contemporary Russia Stalin’s government is deliberately attempting to inculcate the old family virtues. Movies, plays, novels have restored respect for parents, the old family ties, to honor again. Gallantry towards women seems to be coming back; and gallantry towards women is a shocking survival of feudalism, a symbol of their inferior position in society. Divorce, once about as easy and inexpensive as it could possibly be, has now been made more expensive and more difficult. More important, the government seems to be encouraging the spread of a sentiment that marriage is a serious and permanent affair, something made in heaven as heaven now seems understood in Russia. Abortion, which the old Bolsheviks proudly made as legal and as easy as appendectomy in America, and almost as frequent, has now been forbidden by law save where it can be certified as necessary to preserve the woman’s life. Stalin is actually taking measures to encourage large families. And underlying these various measures, and much more important as a general indication of what is going on in Russia than any one of them, is an atmosphere we should almost call Victorian. The present rulers of Russia seem to be trying deliberately to cultivate the kind of sentiments characteristic of societies in equilibrium--the domestic affections, simple patriotism, love of work and routine, obedience to those in power, dislike for individual eccentricities, in short, what Pareto called the “persistent aggregates.”

Pursuing these ends, Stalin has recently decreed that Marxist debunking of Russian history is to cease, that Russians are once more to learn of the glories of the Russian past. The Byzantine missionaries who brought Christianity to Russia are no longer to be painted as fools and villains, agents of what was clearly capitalistic imperialism, abject persons like contemporary missionaries bringing Bible, rum and syphilis to the South Seas. On the contrary, Christianity in Russia is to be seen as an essential step in preparing the barbarous Slavs for higher things. Peter the Great and Catherine are no longer to be made cruel despots. They, too, were great architects of Russia’s destiny, without whom millions of other Slavs and Asiatics might not now enjoy the blessings of Communism. Perhaps Stalin hopes that his people will love him the more, once they learn how many other Stalins have in the past ruled over them as Czars.

_V. Summary_