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.