The French drew from the virtuous days of Roman republicanism, from the abstractions of the Enlightenment, and from their own leaders and martyrs. Babeuf, the forerunner of Socialism, became Gracchus Babeuf. Claude Henri, Comte de St. Simon, kept his Christian names, but dropped the compromising contact with a saint, and became Claude Henri Bonhomme. The unfortunate Leroys (Kings) found it well to change to Laloys (Laws) or something equally patriotic. One faithful Jacobin had his child republicanly baptized Libre Constitution Leturc. The French, however, did not stop with persons. Corrupt street names were changed, the Place Louis XV becoming Place de la Révolution, the rue de la Couronne becoming rue de la Nation. Place names underwent wholesale changes that must have added greatly to the wartime disruption of the mail service. Most of the Saints were dropped, which alone would cause a lot of trouble. Lyons, having sinned against the revolution by siding with the Federalists, on being taken by troops of the Convention was re-christened Commune Affranchie (Freed Town). Le Havre became Havre-Marat. In the conventional greeting of one’s fellows, monsieur became citoyen. For a while the word “roi” was under a taboo as definite as the kind the anthropologist studies, and was actually cut out of classic authors like Racine. There was an attempt, possibly serious, possibly journalistic, to change “reine abeille” into “abeille pondeuse”--“queen bee” into “laying bee.”
In their determination to uproot everything of the contaminated past, the French revolutionists decided to revolutionize the calendar, to do away with names like January, which recalled the vicious old Roman god Janus, or July, which recalled the even more vicious Roman tyrant, Julius Caesar. So they made twelve new months, and named them, in melodious French, after the glorious works of Nature--_germinal_, the month of buds, _fructidor_, the month of ripening, _brumaire_, the month of mists. Although the French boasted the universality of their revolutionary aims and principles, they were apparently undisturbed by the narrow limitation of their new calendar to French climatic conditions. The calendar is, of course, most inappropriate to Australia, and even to the American midwest.
The Russians, in addition to their fondness for personal revolutionary _noms de guerre_, have been particularly addicted to changing place names, and unlike the French, have hitherto made them stick, insofar at least as the names were those of good Stalinists. Catherine the Great, in particular, had put herself on the map as successfully as did Alexander the Great, but she has vanished altogether from Soviet Russia. Ekaterinodar has become Krasnodar, Ekaterineburg Sverdlovsk, and Ekaterinoslav Dnepropetrovsk. The familiar Nizhni Novgorod has only recently, with a loss of euphony and great associations, become Gorki. Stalin, for a living man, has done very well for himself. Stalinabad is perhaps the most exotic of the Stalin towns, but most effectively symbolic no doubt was the changing of Tsaritsyn to Stalingrad--not the only place where Stalin has replaced the Czar. From long Socialist tradition, “comrade” took the place occupied by “citizen” in the French revolution. Children, too, were given names as suitable to the day as were Praise God and Libre Constitution to their day. Vladilen, a telescoping of Vladimir and Lenin, is one of the most shockingly unconventional to an old Russian.
This renaming is clearly one of the uniformities we can list for all our revolutions. Even the moderate American revolution indulged in some renaming. Boston saw King Street and Queen Street give way to names like Federal and State, thoroughly suited to the new regime; but for some reason or other the tainted name of Hanover Street survived. The American name for a certain harmful fly is the Hessian fly, a name given it in revolutionary days. A kind of cousin of that fly is known in the South as the Abe Lincoln bug, which is a reminder of the fact that what we call the Civil War was essentially an abortive revolution.
There is no need to worry much over an explanation of this rage for renaming. Names are to the savage associated with magic, and we are constantly reminded in these days of our own nearness to the savage. Change a name and you change the thing. It’s all very simple. We are here, however, interested rather in the effect of all this renaming on the outsider, and we can be reasonably sure that it affords an example of the kind of thing that begins to wear on him. The revolution in names is petty enough. But for John Jones life is an accumulation of petty matters; and John is not built to support a very complete set of changes in the trivial details of which his habits are made. Witness Rip Van Winkle.
There is also, of course, the strain of living under the kind of government we have in the last chapter described as the government of the Terror. Even the humblest person, the person most indifferent to politics, can never tell when the lightning is going to strike him or his household, when he may be haled into court as a class enemy or a counter-revolutionary. Detailed study of this constant threat, this omnipresence of the government, cannot be attempted here. We may, however, take up briefly two phases which particularly affect the outsider.
First, as we shall see shortly from the point of view of the insider, all these revolutions have at their crisis a quality unmistakably puritanical or ascetic or, to use an overworked word, idealistic. There is a serious attempt by those in authority to eradicate the minor vices, as well as what some might feel inclined to call the major pleasures. With what the Saints in England tried to do in the seventeenth century most Americans are familiar, if only from repercussions in New England. But Americans, who have always exaggerated the French capacity for the pleasures of the senses, are perhaps not so aware of the fact that in ’93 and ’94 there was an earnest attempt to clean up Paris, to shut up brothels, gaming houses, to eliminate actual drunkenness. Virtue was the order of the day. You couldn’t even be lazy. Some Jacobin would be sure to report you to the club, with the suggestion that the best place to cure you of unrepublican laziness was the army. The puritanism of the Bolsheviks may seem even more paradoxical, but it most certainly existed, and we shall return shortly to its consideration.
Now there is no doubt that in the better world towards which we all in some measure aspire, drinking, whoring, gambling, laziness, boastfulness, and a whole lot of things we all condemn, will simply not exist. But it seems equally undeniable that here and now on this earth, and for some generations back, a fairly large number of human beings have been and are addicted to one or more of these pursuits, regarding them--not always consciously with the intellect--as necessary compensations for dullness or other inadequacies in their daily lives. We must again remind ourselves that we are not dealing with moral questions, not praising or condemning, but trying to arrange facts in a useful order. It seems then that the following uniformity is clear: the extremists’ attempt to enforce a life without the ordinary vices within a fairly short time puts a strain on the outsider very hard for him, or her, to bear.
Not only is the outsider denied access to what he probably regards as legitimate amusement; the new authorities will not even leave him to himself. Revolutions are very hard indeed on privacy. Gorki once wrote that “Lenin was a man who prevented people from leading their accustomed lives as no one before him was able to do.” This is no doubt a rhetorical exaggeration, but one can see what Gorki is getting at. And as people have a certain inertia in the direction of leading their “accustomed lives,” we can perhaps understand better why Stalin rather than Trotsky has proved to be Lenin’s successor. In the crisis period the revolution comes to hound John Jones in whatever he does. In a revolution even the conventional back-biting, gossip and hatreds of ordinary social life are intensified beyond endurance. The Jacobins, especially in the provinces, were eager to pick up any bit of gossip that would show a reform was needed. Citizen W should keep his dog tied up, citizen X should be made to marry the girl, citizen Y should be admonished against outbursts of temper, rich citizen Z should be made to give his consent to the marriage of his daughter to a poor but honest Jacobin youth in good standing with the club. One expects this sort of thing from one’s own family and friends, but not, even in the totalitarian state, from the government. The Germans have a delightful proverb, which may perhaps give them some solace today: “The soup is never eaten as hot as it’s cooked.” But certainly in the crisis period of revolutions there is an effort to force it steaming down the throat of the ordinary citizen. In the long run, he can’t stand it, and his cooks learn their lesson and allow it to cool off a bit. But that is in the period of convalescence from the revolutionary fever.