Part 16

There is usually a short period between the overthrow of the moderates and the full impact of the Terror. The machinery of the Terror, for one thing, hastily assembled though it is, cannot be assembled overnight. Though the earlier history of the revolution has had its share of violence, there has been an interlude or so of apparent peace at times during the struggle between the moderates and the extremists. The pressure of foreign enemies and their émigré allies is not immediately at its strongest. Yet as the weeks go on the forces that make for the Terror come into full operation.

We have in this chapter briefly described the rise of the extremists, and have attempted to analyze the reasons for their victory. We have taken them to the point where they have disposed of all important conflicting groups, and have consolidated their position by installing a centralized system of government. For the next few months, or for a year or so, the extremists can be as extreme as they like. No one dare challenge them. We have come to that crisis in the fever of revolution men commonly call the Reign of Terror. This very important subject must be treated in a separate chapter.

Chapter SEVEN REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE

I. Pervasiveness of the Terror

“August 8, 1775. Riflemen took a man in New Milford, Connecticut, a most incorrigible Tory, who called them d--d rebels, etc., and made him walk before them to Litchfield, which is twenty miles, and carry one of his own geese all the way in his hand. When they arrived there, they tarred him, and made him pluck his goose, and then bestowed the feathers on him, drummed him out of the company, and obliged him to kneel down and thank them for their lenity.” The Jacobins of Rodez in southern France drew up a list of “damned dogs of noblemen” and others unworthy of wearing a mustache, the new symbol of patriotism, republican virility and orthodoxy. It then ordered its committee of surveillance to see that any such persons daring to wear a mustache were seized and shaved, “taking good care to get the job done without soap, and with the dullest razor available.” Shaving seems in some ways a ritual performance lifted above the ordinary acts of the toilet, for on October 3, 1775, the New York Sons of Liberty “in solemn Congress assembled” took a vote of thanks: “to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, barber, for his firm, spirited, and patriotic conduct in refusing to complete an operation vulgarly called shaving, which he had begun on the face of Captain John Croser, commander ... of one of his Majesty’s transports.... It is to be wished that all gentlemen of the razor will follow this wise, prudent, interesting example.”

The undignified little details are important, for they help bring home to us the pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror. There is not only the melodrama of the block, the guillotine and the firing-squad, not only the heightened struggle for power among the great of the new order, not only the tension of foreign and civil war, there is also the tragi-comedy of thousands of little lives invaded by heroic concerns which are ordinarily not theirs at all. The Terror touches great and small with the obsessive power of a fashion; it holds men as little of the common weal ever holds them, unless they are professionally devoted to the study or practice of politics. During the Terror, politics becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable for John Jones or Jacques Duval as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather. Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.

This participation in the common thing, in the drama of the revolutionary state, means different things to those we may call outsiders and those we may call insiders. The opposition is purely one of convenience. No doubt there are insensible gradations from the ardent revolutionary extremist--the admirably drawn Evariste Gamelin of Anatole France’s The Gods Are Athirst, for instance--through the neutral and colorless Center to skulking and repressed anti-revolutionaries. But in broad lines the division between the many outside the revolutionary cult and the small active band of orthodox believers in the new dispensation is worth making. Let us look first at the Terror as it affects the life of the outsider.

II. The Terror and the Outsider

This ordinary outsider is not the actively hostile person, the émigré in fact or, as the French actually put it, the émigré d’esprit, the émigré who has quit spiritually if not in the flesh. He is not the disgruntled moderate. He is simply the man who makes up the bulk of modern societies, the man who on the whole accepts what others do in politics, the man who fairly soon gets on the band-wagon. Especially in its crisis period, the revolution is awfully hard on this outsider. It may provide him with a certain number of spectacles in the form of various celebrations of the new revolutionary cults--processions, trees of liberty, festivals of reason, and so on. But certainly in the French revolution there are many indications that the outsiders got very tired of this, that in the long run they found the old Catholic ceremonials more to their liking. One wonders whether in the long run the mass ceremonials which Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini seem to manage so well will not also wear a bit thin. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that our modern revolutionists are much better stage managers than their predecessors.

The revolutionary mania for renaming seems also to tend to confuse and annoy the outsider. The English confined their efforts largely to the names of persons, where they achieved some remarkable results. We are all familiar with Praise God Barebone, and Put-thy-Trust-in-Christ-and-Flee-Fornication Williams is perhaps more than a legend. The Puritans of course drew chiefly from the Bible and from evangelical abstractions--Faith, Prudence, Charity, and so on.

The French drew from the virtuous days of Roman republicanism, from the abstractions of the Enlightenment, and from their own leaders and martyrs. Babeuf, the forerunner of Socialism, became Gracchus Babeuf. Claude Henri, Comte de St. Simon, kept his Christian names, but dropped the compromising contact with a saint, and became Claude Henri Bonhomme. The unfortunate Leroys (Kings) found it well to change to Laloys (Laws) or something equally patriotic. One faithful Jacobin had his child republicanly baptized Libre Constitution Leturc. The French, however, did not stop with persons. Corrupt street names were changed, the Place Louis XV becoming Place de la Révolution, the rue de la Couronne becoming rue de la Nation. Place names underwent wholesale changes that must have added greatly to the wartime disruption of the mail service. Most of the Saints were dropped, which alone would cause a lot of trouble. Lyons, having sinned against the revolution by siding with the Federalists, on being taken by troops of the Convention was re-christened Commune Affranchie (Freed Town). Le Havre became Havre-Marat. In the conventional greeting of one’s fellows, monsieur became citoyen. For a while the word “roi” was under a taboo as definite as the kind the anthropologist studies, and was actually cut out of classic authors like Racine. There was an attempt, possibly serious, possibly journalistic, to change “reine abeille” into “abeille pondeuse”--“queen bee” into “laying bee.”

In their determination to uproot everything of the contaminated past, the French revolutionists decided to revolutionize the calendar, to do away with names like January, which recalled the vicious old Roman god Janus, or July, which recalled the even more vicious Roman tyrant, Julius Caesar. So they made twelve new months, and named them, in melodious French, after the glorious works of Nature--germinal, the month of buds, fructidor, the month of ripening, brumaire, the month of mists. Although the French boasted the universality of their revolutionary aims and principles, they were apparently undisturbed by the narrow limitation of their new calendar to French climatic conditions. The calendar is, of course, most inappropriate to Australia, and even to the American midwest.

The Russians, in addition to their fondness for personal revolutionary noms de guerre, have been particularly addicted to changing place names, and unlike the French, have hitherto made them stick, insofar at least as the names were those of good Stalinists. Catherine the Great, in particular, had put herself on the map as successfully as did Alexander the Great, but she has vanished altogether from Soviet Russia. Ekaterinodar has become Krasnodar, Ekaterineburg Sverdlovsk, and Ekaterinoslav Dnepropetrovsk. The familiar Nizhni Novgorod has only recently, with a loss of euphony and great associations, become Gorki. Stalin, for a living man, has done very well for himself. Stalinabad is perhaps the most exotic of the Stalin towns, but most effectively symbolic no doubt was the changing of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad--not the only place where Stalin has replaced the Czar. From long Socialist tradition, “comrade” took the place occupied by “citizen” in the French revolution. Children, too, were given names as suitable to the day as were Praise God and Libre Constitution to their day. Vladilen, a telescoping of Vladimir and Lenin, is one of the most shockingly unconventional to an old Russian.

This renaming is clearly one of the uniformities we can list for all our revolutions. Even the moderate American revolution indulged in some renaming. Boston saw King Street and Queen Street give way to names like Federal and State, thoroughly suited to the new regime; but for some reason or other the tainted name of Hanover Street survived. The American name for a certain harmful fly is the Hessian fly, a name given it in revolutionary days. A kind of cousin of that fly is known in the South as the Abe Lincoln bug, which is a reminder of the fact that what we call the Civil War was essentially an abortive revolution.

There is no need to worry much over an explanation of this rage for renaming. Names are to the savage associated with magic, and we are constantly reminded in these days of our own nearness to the savage. Change a name and you change the thing. It’s all very simple. We are here, however, interested rather in the effect of all this renaming on the outsider, and we can be reasonably sure that it affords an example of the kind of thing that begins to wear on him. The revolution in names is petty enough. But for John Jones life is an accumulation of petty matters; and John is not built to support a very complete set of changes in the trivial details of which his habits are made. Witness Rip Van Winkle.

There is also, of course, the strain of living under the kind of government we have in the last chapter described as the government of the Terror. Even the humblest person, the person most indifferent to politics, can never tell when the lightning is going to strike him or his household, when he may be haled into court as a class enemy or a counter-revolutionary. Detailed study of this constant threat, this omnipresence of the government, cannot be attempted here. We may, however, take up briefly two phases which particularly affect the outsider.

First, as we shall see shortly from the point of view of the insider, all these revolutions have at their crisis a quality unmistakably puritanical or ascetic or, to use an overworked word, idealistic. There is a serious attempt by those in authority to eradicate the minor vices, as well as what some might feel inclined to call the major pleasures. With what the Saints in England tried to do in the seventeenth century most Americans are familiar, if only from repercussions in New England. But Americans, who have always exaggerated the French capacity for the pleasures of the senses, are perhaps not so aware of the fact that in ’93 and ’94 there was an earnest attempt to clean up Paris, to shut up brothels, gaming houses, to eliminate actual drunkenness. Virtue was the order of the day. You couldn’t even be lazy. Some Jacobin would be sure to report you to the club, with the suggestion that the best place to cure you of unrepublican laziness was the army. The puritanism of the Bolsheviks may seem even more paradoxical, but it most certainly existed, and we shall return shortly to its consideration.

Now there is no doubt that in the better world towards which we all in some measure aspire, drinking, whoring, gambling, laziness, boastfulness, and a whole lot of things we all condemn, will simply not exist. But it seems equally undeniable that here and now on this earth, and for some generations back, a fairly large number of human beings have been and are addicted to one or more of these pursuits, regarding them--not always consciously with the intellect--as necessary compensations for dullness or other inadequacies in their daily lives. We must again remind ourselves that we are not dealing with moral questions, not praising or condemning, but trying to arrange facts in a useful order. It seems then that the following uniformity is clear: the extremists’ attempt to enforce a life without the ordinary vices within a fairly short time puts a strain on the outsider very hard for him, or her, to bear.

Not only is the outsider denied access to what he probably regards as legitimate amusement; the new authorities will not even leave him to himself. Revolutions are very hard indeed on privacy. Gorki once wrote that “Lenin was a man who prevented people from leading their accustomed lives as no one before him was able to do.” This is no doubt a rhetorical exaggeration, but one can see what Gorki is getting at. And as people have a certain inertia in the direction of leading their “accustomed lives,” we can perhaps understand better why Stalin rather than Trotsky has proved to be Lenin’s successor. In the crisis period the revolution comes to hound John Jones in whatever he does. In a revolution even the conventional back-biting, gossip and hatreds of ordinary social life are intensified beyond endurance. The Jacobins, especially in the provinces, were eager to pick up any bit of gossip that would show a reform was needed. Citizen W should keep his dog tied up, citizen X should be made to marry the girl, citizen Y should be admonished against outbursts of temper, rich citizen Z should be made to give his consent to the marriage of his daughter to a poor but honest Jacobin youth in good standing with the club. One expects this sort of thing from one’s own family and friends, but not, even in the totalitarian state, from the government. The Germans have a delightful proverb, which may perhaps give them some solace today: “The soup is never eaten as hot as it’s cooked.” But certainly in the crisis period of revolutions there is an effort to force it steaming down the throat of the ordinary citizen. In the long run, he can’t stand it, and his cooks learn their lesson and allow it to cool off a bit. But that is in the period of convalescence from the revolutionary fever.

Shut out from his ordinary pleasures and vices, constrained to fight for, or at least to cheer long, loud, and conspicuously for the revolutionary state in its struggle with foreign and civil foes, exposed to privation and suffering from scarcity attendant on war and the inevitable inefficiencies of the new government, urged to the “height of revolutionary circumstances” on every hand, in press, theater, pulpit, rostrum, mass demonstration, above all inescapably caught in the common and very exhausting nervous excitement which marks the crisis period, John Jones sooner or later finds these strains insupportable, and gets ready to welcome anyone who can throw the extremists out. Perhaps no one of these strains would be in itself unbearable, though it does seem likely that there is a kind of saturation point in large-scale, obsessive political propaganda after which such propaganda actually backfires. We may hope to learn more in this respect from contemporary German and Russian experience. At any rate, the converging series of pressures outlined above seems clearly to have put too great a strain on the outsider in our revolutions.

III. The Terror and the Insider: The Religious Parallel

To the insider, to the true believer, the revolution appears as a very different thing in this crisis period, though one may guess that for some of the less ardent insiders much of what has been said about the outsiders begins, after a while, to hold true also. The revolution begins to take too much out of him, and he begins to have his hesitations and his doubts, to be bored with the endless ceremonies, deputations, committees, tribunals, militia work, and the other chores necessary to achieve the reign of virtue on earth. He, too, becomes an outsider. But the true faithful stay to the end, to the block, the guillotine, the firing-squad, or exile.

Now to this insider it would seem that the service of the revolution supplies many of the satisfactions commonly supplied by what we call religion. This analogy with religion has been frequently made. It has been applied, not only to the English revolution where its fitness is undisputed, but also to the French and Russian revolutions. Since both Jacobins and Bolsheviks were violently hostile to Christianity and boasted themselves atheists or at least deists, this analogy has given a great deal of offense both to Christians and to their enemies. For the Marxist in particular the assertion that his behavior has similarities with the behavior of men under the acknowledged influence of religion is like a red rag to a bull. Nor is the Marxist wholly unjustified in his anger, for the glib phrase, “Oh, the Communists are just another fanatical sect,” is frequently thrown out by shallow conservatives as at once a reproach and a dismissal. Actually, to judge from past experience, it would seem that large numbers of men can be brought to do certain very important things of the kind the Communists want to have done only under the influence of what we call religion; that is, some pattern of more or less similar sentiments, moral aspirations, and ritualistic practices. Marxism as a religion has already got a great deal done; Marxism as a “scientific theory” alone would hardly have got beyond the covers of Das Kapital and the learned journals.

But the dispute sketched above is endless, and we are not rash enough to suppose we can settle it. Those who use the term “religion” in this connection seem to us to be trying to describe a phenomenon of the world of sense-experience, one that needs to be integrated with other phenomena of revolutions. It is certainly true, however, that this use apparently arouses in many persons emotions unfavorable to the continued objective study of the subject. Anyone who could suggest a neutral term as effectively pointing to the same phenomena as does the term “religion” would be performing a great service for sociology. No such term at present existing, we shall have to continue to use the word “religion.” We must insist that this word does not refer necessarily and exclusively to a formally theistic cult like Christianity; and above all, that it does not necessarily imply belief in the “supernatural.” We take it that in the present analysis the important thing about a religious belief is that under its influence men work very hard and excitedly in common to achieve here or somewhere an ideal, a pattern of life not at the moment universally--or even largely--achieved. Religion attempts to close in favor of the best of human hopes the gap between what men are and what men would like to be; at least in its young and active phase, it will not for a moment admit that such a gap can long exist.

To discern the element of religion in the behavior of the ardent extremist is not to deny the existence of economic motives. Indeed, at this stage some of the most acute phases of the struggle among classes are to be noticed, and form one of the uniformities we can clearly consider established. Whatever the place of economic class struggles in the days just before the revolution--and in our four revolutions it takes varied forms by no means adequately summed up in phrases such as “feudal nobility,” “middle class,” and “proletariat”--once the revolution gets going these class struggles have at least one phase common in all four societies. The property of many, if not most, of those openly and stubbornly identified with the beaten parties is confiscated for the benefit of the successful parties, identified as “the people.” Furthermore, as the different moderate groups are defeated their property, too, is commonly confiscated in the same way.

In the English revolution the Royalists lost a large part of their property, mostly in land; and though lay Presbyterians were not as a rule subjected to confiscation of property unless they were actively on the wrong side in politics, there was a great deal of easing Presbyterians and other unacceptable ecclesiastics out of their livings. Laurence Washington, a clergyman, the father of the John of Virginia, and a direct ancestor of George, was “plundered” as the phrase went in 1643, cause he was said to have said that the parliamentary army had more papists in it than there were around the King. That is to say, he was deprived of his living. We need hardly be reminded that Loyalist property was confiscated during the American revolution. Indeed the late J. F. Jameson concludes that in a quiet way--quiet at least for revolutions--the American revolution effected in its whole course a very sensible democratization, or spreading into smaller units, of ownership of property in this country. Both in France and in Russia the revolutions saw the confiscation primarily of land, but even in France to some extent also of capital, and their redistribution. We need not go into detail here on these agrarian problems. Sufficient to state that many of those who came to the top in the crisis period, both leaders and followers, had good reason to hope that by staying on top their economic status would be consistently better than it had been. This is true regardless of what theories and ideals, laissez-faire or Socialism, were appealed to as guiding the new distribution.

But though we must recognize the economic motive, as we recognize the drive to centralization to repel attacks from within and without, our picture is incomplete until we consider those elements unavoidably called religious. Partly because the economic and political elements are in their conventional sense familiar to most people nowadays, partly because these religious elements appear to be among the most important variables in the situation, we are here emphasizing them. They seem to be among the most important variables because their presence in an acute form gives a different and much more pervasive tone to the political and economic elements of struggle, which frequently occur by themselves in very similar form and even somewhat similar intensity in situations we do not commonly label revolutionary. It is also true that in the growth of Wesleyan Methodism in eighteenth-century England, for instance, in times not to be called revolutionary, one finds actively religious behavior among large numbers of people, behavior in many ways like that we are going to analyze in our revolutionary insider. But Wesleyanism was politically conservative on the whole, and not directed at a given social and political system. The whole point, indeed, of the three revolutions we are about to analyze is that religious enthusiasms, organization, ritual and ideas appear inextricably bound up with economic and political aims.

The insiders in all three of our complete revolutions, and indeed to a certain extent in the fourth, the American revolution, seem to have wished to put into life here on earth some of the order, the discipline, the contempt for the easy vices, which the Calvinist sought to put there. Indeed our first revolution, the English, is commonly labeled the Calvinist or Puritan revolution. Here we may expect a protest from the Communists, an indignant assertion that Marx put such Christian weaknesses as a desire to subdue the flesh well behind him, that his followers are all for an abundance of food and drink, and the other good things of this world for everybody. We shall return to that question in a moment. In the meantime we can begin to see some lurking ascetic tendency in Communism if we reflect on how indignant good Communists would be over the slogan “wine, women, and song for everybody.”