This inefficiency of the governments of the crisis period comes out clearly in their attempts to regulate and control the economic life of the state. This whole matter has probably very little to do with the general problem of what is known as “economic planning.” Again we must emphasize that we are concerned only with the anatomies of certain specific revolutions. Suffice it to say that in France in 1793-94 and in Russia in 1918-21 armies were fed and supplied with munitions, and some civilians kept alive at any rate, under a pretty absolute state control of economic activity. The French _maximum_ meant of course price- and wage-fixing, and the Russian war communism was an even more complete form of central planning. Yet in France violation of the _maximum_ was as frequent as bootlegging used to be in this country, and the detailed history of the _maximum_ seen as part of local history would certainly provide some amusing bits. In Russia illegal trading in the war years was again very like our bootlegging. The famous Sukharevka Market in Moscow was occasionally raided but on the whole winked at by Lenin’s government. All city dwellers who could possibly do so made trips to the country to bargain with peasants for forbidden food supplies. Here again the intimate little details of daily life are fascinating, and call for the full talents of the social historian.
There seems to be a pretty unanimous admission by historians, even when they are hostile to revolutions in general, that during the crisis period ordinary crimes of violence are rare. There may be plenty of cruelty and corruption among these new administrators and judges, the new regime may be very far from insuring peace and order, but conventional robbers, cutthroats, kidnapers, and their like are not very active. Your good stupid Tory has a simple explanation: they’ve all got government jobs. We can, however, hardly accept this as a blanket explanation. It seems likely that the ordinary criminals are for the moment pretty well cowed by the general crusade against ordinary vice and crime which is a part of the crisis period and to which we are coming shortly. Petty thieves and in several instances even prostitutes were summarily disposed of by what amounts to lynch law during the French revolution, and similar instances can be found in England and Russia. One need not accept it as a general suggestion that you can always cow criminals by lynching; here, as throughout this book, we are studying a particular set of events, seeking some rough uniformities, and making no attempt at general conclusions in any such field as criminology. It may be that in the general tension, in the extraordinary widening of public concerns until privacy is almost impossible, so private a thing as ordinary crime is difficult. The criminal is disturbed, not only by fear of being lynched, but by an indefinable general fear which he shares with ordinary citizens. For fear needs no object, and in the Terror often has none. It must be remembered that this crisis period is brief--a few months, a few years at the most. At any rate, again a simple uniformity stands out: a considerable lessening in the number of ordinary crimes is to be noted during the crisis period. Mr. Chamberlin notes that Moscow in 1918-19 was a very safe place to live in--if you could get enough to eat and keep warm.
There is usually a short period between the overthrow of the moderates and the full impact of the Terror. The machinery of the Terror, for one thing, hastily assembled though it is, cannot be assembled overnight. Though the earlier history of the revolution has had its share of violence, there has been an interlude or so of apparent peace at times during the struggle between the moderates and the extremists. The pressure of foreign enemies and their _émigré_ allies is not immediately at its strongest. Yet as the weeks go on the forces that make for the Terror come into full operation.
We have in this chapter briefly described the rise of the extremists, and have attempted to analyze the reasons for their victory. We have taken them to the point where they have disposed of all important conflicting groups, and have consolidated their position by installing a centralized system of government. For the next few months, or for a year or so, the extremists can be as extreme as they like. No one dare challenge them. We have come to that crisis in the fever of revolution men commonly call the Reign of Terror. This very important subject must be treated in a separate chapter.
_Chapter_ SEVEN REIGNS OF TERROR AND VIRTUE
_I. Pervasiveness of the Terror_
“August 8, 1775. Riflemen took a man in New Milford, Connecticut, a most incorrigible Tory, who called them d--d rebels, etc., and made him walk before them to Litchfield, which is twenty miles, and carry one of his own geese all the way in his hand. When they arrived there, they tarred him, and made him pluck his goose, and then bestowed the feathers on him, drummed him out of the company, and obliged him to kneel down and thank them for their lenity.” The Jacobins of Rodez in southern France drew up a list of “damned dogs of noblemen” and others unworthy of wearing a mustache, the new symbol of patriotism, republican virility and orthodoxy. It then ordered its committee of surveillance to see that any such persons daring to wear a mustache were seized and shaved, “taking good care to get the job done without soap, and with the dullest razor available.” Shaving seems in some ways a ritual performance lifted above the ordinary acts of the toilet, for on October 3, 1775, the New York Sons of Liberty “in solemn Congress assembled” took a vote of thanks: “to Mr. Jacob Vredenburgh, barber, for his firm, spirited, and patriotic conduct in refusing to complete an operation vulgarly called _shaving_, which he had begun on the face of Captain John Croser, commander ... of one of his Majesty’s transports.... It is to be wished that all gentlemen of the razor will follow this wise, prudent, interesting example.”
The undignified little details are important, for they help bring home to us the pervasiveness of the Reign of Terror. There is not only the melodrama of the block, the guillotine and the firing-squad, not only the heightened struggle for power among the great of the new order, not only the tension of foreign and civil war, there is also the tragi-comedy of thousands of little lives invaded by heroic concerns which are ordinarily not theirs at all. The Terror touches great and small with the obsessive power of a fashion; it holds men as little of the common weal ever holds them, unless they are professionally devoted to the study or practice of politics. During the Terror, politics becomes as real, as pressing, as unavoidable for John Jones or Jacques Duval as food and drink, wife or mistress, his job and the weather. Political indifference, that mainstay of the modern state, becomes impossible for even the most selfish, the most unworldly.
This participation in the common thing, in the drama of the revolutionary state, means different things to those we may call outsiders and those we may call insiders. The opposition is purely one of convenience. No doubt there are insensible gradations from the ardent revolutionary extremist--the admirably drawn Evariste Gamelin of Anatole France’s _The Gods Are Athirst_, for instance--through the neutral and colorless Center to skulking and repressed anti-revolutionaries. But in broad lines the division between the many outside the revolutionary cult and the small active band of orthodox believers in the new dispensation is worth making. Let us look first at the Terror as it affects the life of the outsider.
_II. The Terror and the Outsider_
This ordinary outsider is not the actively hostile person, the _émigré_ in fact or, as the French actually put it, the _émigré d’esprit_, the _émigré_ who has quit spiritually if not in the flesh. He is not the disgruntled moderate. He is simply the man who makes up the bulk of modern societies, the man who on the whole accepts what others do in politics, the man who fairly soon gets on the band-wagon. Especially in its crisis period, the revolution is awfully hard on this outsider. It may provide him with a certain number of spectacles in the form of various celebrations of the new revolutionary cults--processions, trees of liberty, festivals of reason, and so on. But certainly in the French revolution there are many indications that the outsiders got very tired of this, that in the long run they found the old Catholic ceremonials more to their liking. One wonders whether in the long run the mass ceremonials which Stalin as well as Hitler and Mussolini seem to manage so well will not also wear a bit thin. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that our modern revolutionists are much better stage managers than their predecessors.
The revolutionary mania for renaming seems also to tend to confuse and annoy the outsider. The English confined their efforts largely to the names of persons, where they achieved some remarkable results. We are all familiar with Praise God Barebone, and Put-thy-Trust-in-Christ-and-Flee-Fornication Williams is perhaps more than a legend. The Puritans of course drew chiefly from the Bible and from evangelical abstractions--Faith, Prudence, Charity, and so on.