appears in the crises of all our revolutions. The hatred of Puritan for
Cavalier, of Jacobin for aristocrats, Federalists, and other enemies of
the Republic of Virtue, the hatred of Bolsheviks for Whites, Kadets and
compromisists, of American Whigs for Tories, was in itself an elaborate
compound. One element in this compound was probably about what the
Marxist means when he talks about the class struggle. At any rate, by
the time of the Terror the different antagonistic groups within the
society have polarized into the orthodox revolutionists in power and
the somewhat mixed bloc of their enemies. Heightened like all other
tensions and conflicts by the course of the revolution, these class
antagonisms now take on a sharpness they normally possess only in the
writings and speeches of intellectuals and agitators. The party spirit,
which is in one element probably but one form of the antagonism between
classes, here seizes upon the most trivial symbols to make men aware
of their irreconciliable differences. Thus the Jacobins adopted the
term “sans-culottes” as a rallying cry to emphasize the class struggle.
The culottes are the knee-breeches of the silk-stockinged gentlemen of
the old regime, and those without _culottes_ presumably wore the long
trousers of the common man, the workingman. The Russian revolution was
filled with the slogans of the class struggle in the narrow Marxist
sense. Now though there was much more than class struggles in our
revolutions, and though these struggles are not quite as simply
determined as many believers in the economic interpretation of history
sometimes make out, it would be very foolish to deny the importance of
one of the variables in the Terror--those antagonisms between groups or
“classes” largely held together by economic interests and by a common
social and intellectual heritage, a common way of life, which our
generation knows as the class struggle.
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.