Part 18

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.