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.