Part 19

These revolutionary faiths are very interesting in their eschatologies, their notions of final ends like heaven and hell. The English revolution was dominated by some of the wilder as well as by the more conventional of Christian eschatologies. The Millenarians expected the second coming year after year. The rule of the Saints was just around the corner. The Jacobins had a much less concrete notion of heaven, and this heaven was to be definitely here on earth--the republic of Virtue which we have seen as Robespierre’s ideal. After the dictatorship of the revolutionary government, this perfect republic was to appear, and Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would be more than a slogan. To hardened Americans a republic doesn’t sound at all like a heaven, but we must believe that it was very different for the earnest Jacobin of 1794. The Russian heaven is the classless society, to be attained after the purgatory of the dictatorship of the proletariat has slowly put an end to the worldly miseries of the class struggle. It seems that even the Stalinists admit being still in purgatory. The specific content of life in the classless society is somewhat vaguely described by most Communists; and Marx himself, unlike Mohammed, went into no details about his heaven. There will be competition, one gathers, but no struggle, and certainly no struggle over economic goods. Competition will be on a lofty plane, as among artists. Perhaps there will be competition in love? At any rate, as in a more robust heaven, the old German Valhalla, the heroes will fight all day, but at night their wounds will heal.

All of these faiths were incorporated in social groups, and hence had rituals. The present writer has elsewhere described at some length the Jacobin ritual, a strange hodgepodge of Catholic, Protestant, classical and other elements, with Republican creeds, Republican baptisms and prayers, even with a revolutionary sign of the cross in the name of _Marat, Le Pelletier, la liberté ou la mort_. Communist ritual is less crudely imitative, and perhaps less rich. But it is just as definite, as you will find in talking to an initiated Communist. Marx’s _Das Kapital_, of course, is hardly ever read in orthodox circles except ritualistically. The French revolutionists had their saints and martyrs, especially the murdered Marat: the apotheosis of Lenin, clearly begun in his lifetime, has become a cult centered around his tomb in Moscow. Lenin is perhaps, like Jeremy Bentham preserved in University College, London, a purely secularist saint; but a saint he is. Stalin, we are told, has had to fight very hard the tendency of simple Russian folk to mix a certain amount of superstition with their natural devotion to their present great leader. He would not care to be classed with the old icons. Smaller groups, like the Communist Youth, are brought up in an atmosphere of ritual, are in this respect more like some of the social side-shows of our Protestant churches than like comparatively secular groups such as the Boy Scouts.

Religious symbolism goes along with this ritual, and was especially developed in France. During the Terror, one met symbolic devices everywhere: the eye of surveillance, seeking out the enemies of the Republic; the triangle of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; the Phrygian cap of liberty, the _bonnet rouge_; the carpenter’s level, symbolizing equality; any kind of mound, which served as symbol for the beneficent Mountain, the party that had carried out the revolution to its logical end. Most of these and many other symbols are to be found in the elaborate pageant of the 20th Prairial at Paris, when Robespierre personally supervised the festival of the Supreme Being. The Russians, aided by modern poster technique, have made a similar, if less pedantic, use of symbols to hold the people together in a Communist society.

_IV. What Makes the Terror?_

In the crisis periods of all four of our revolutions we may distinguish the same set of variables, differently combined and mixed with all sorts of contingent factors to produce the specific situations the narrative historian of these revolutions tends to regard as unique. There are no doubt a very great number of these variables, but for the purposes of a first approximation we may here distinguish seven. These seem not to be related one to another in any important one-way causal relationship. They seem, indeed, more or less like the independent variables of the mathematician, though it is inconceivable that they should be strictly independent. The temptation to single out one of them as the “cause” of the Terror is, like the temptation to find a hero or a villain in any situation, hard to resist. And each one of them has a history, goes back at least to the last generation or two of the old regime.

They are all woven together in a complicated pattern of reality; but without all of them--and this is the important point--you would not have a Reign of Terror, would not have a full crisis in the revolution. The problem of their possible independence need not worry us. Temperature and pressure are independent variables in the mathematical formulation of the laws of thermodynamics; but ice can form at 0° centigrade only if the pressure is negligibly small. We have already stressed this point, perhaps beyond the bounds of good writing. But the old notion of simple, linear, one-way causation is so rooted in our habits of thought, is indeed so useful to us in daily life, that we almost instinctively demand an explanation of a complex situation like the Terror which will enable us to isolate a villain-cause--or a hero-cause.

First, there is what we may call the habit of violence, the paradoxical situation of a people conditioned to expect the unexpected. The more violent and terroristic periods of our revolutions come only after a series of troubles have prepared the way. Not until after several years of civil war in England did the Independents carry out their rigorous measures against the habitual ways of “Merrie England.” The Terror in France in a formal sense does not begin until late in 1793; sporadic outbreaks like the Great Fear of 1789 and the September Massacres of 1792 simply help to establish the mood necessary for a Terror. Even in Russia, where events were telescoped together in a shorter period than in any of our other revolutions, organized violence under the patronage of the government does not clearly appear until the autumn of 1918, a year and a half after the outbreak against the Czar. A telegram from Petrovsky to all soviets is quoted by Mr. Chamberlin, who sees in this the signal for organized Terror. “Last of all, the rear of our armies must be finally cleared of all White Guardism and all scoundrelly conspirators against the power of the working class and the poorest peasants. Not the least wavering, not the least indecision in the application of mass terror.”

This telegram brings forward a second and most important variable--the pressure of a foreign and civil war. War necessities help explain the rapid centralization of the government of the Terror, the hostility to dissenters within the group--they now seem deserters--the widespread excitement which our generation knows well enough by the cant term “war psychosis.” Both in France and in Russia there is a rough correlation between the military situation of the revolutionary armies and the violence of the Terror; as the danger of defeat grows, so does the number of victims of revolutionary tribunals. There is, however, a certain lag, and the Terror continues after the worst of the military danger is over. We may again recall that in England the Irish and the Scotch fulfilled the function of the foreign enemy, even though Great Britain kept free of the continent during the whole period. And both in America and in England the crisis period was accompanied by a formal war, largely a civil war. No sensible person would wish to deny the important place these wars have in the total situation we have called the crisis period.

Third, there is the newness of the machinery of this centralized government. The extremists are certainly not--and we have already emphasized this point--altogether without experience in handling men, though they have dealt with _revolutionists_, not with _all men_. Their long apprenticeship in the cause of the revolution has been a political training of a sort. And in many ways their new network of institutions is able to use some of the routine channels used by the old government. This is especially true in local government. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that the institutions of the Terror are in a sense new, that they do not work smoothly, that those charged with administering them, even if they are not politically inexperienced, are administratively inexperienced. The machinery of the Terror works in fits and starts, and frequently jams badly. Conflicts between administrators arise, and are settled in no routine manner, but by violence. Each failure of the machine annoys those who are trying to run it, and impels them to a new and sudden decision, to another act of violence. This in turn further jams the machinery. It is our old friend the vicious circle.

Fourth, this is also a time of acute economic crisis--not merely what we now call a depression, but a definite shortage of the necessities of life. Again it must be recalled that the Terror does not come at once, in the very beginning of the revolution, but is preceded by a time of troubles very disrupting to the ordinary processes of production. Capital gets frightened and begins to leave the country. Business men hesitate to undertake new enterprises or to continue on the same basis with the old. Peasant risings lessen agricultural production. Then comes the war with its demand for men and munitions. The ensuing dictatorship of the victorious extremists is in part an economic dictatorship, a supervision of the whole economic life of the country, controlled currency, price-fixing, food-rationing, a socialism of the fact long before Marx. The difficulty of distributing inadequate supplies further tries the temper of administrators, adds to the opportunities of denunciators and spies, serves to maintain and sharpen the peculiar excitement, the universal jumpiness of the Terror. It adds to the tenseness of the class struggles which we have already discerned in our study of the old regimes.

In one form or another our fifth variable, class struggles, clearly 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_