As for the more active and violent leaders of the original Terror, they are of course eliminated, either by exile or by death. They are now declared to have been fanatics, villains, bloodthirsty tyrants, scoundrels. They become very convenient scapegoats, explanations of the difficulties the new regime has getting things settled. If there is one very dramatic scapegoat, and he is already dead, so much the better. Cromwell’s body was dug up after the Stuart Restoration and hanged at Tyburn, along with Ireton’s and Bradshaw’s. He became a tyrant, an ogre, a blasphemer, and so remained on the whole until in the nineteenth century Carlyle started the rehabilitation which has made him a hero. Except for a small sect led by the late Albert Mathiez, Robespierre has never recovered the status of hero. The Thermidoreans made Robespierre a prime scapegoat, the leader of the gang of terrorists, a vain and capricious tyrant, a bloody villain. Lenin, of course, died a saint, but fortunately for Stalin Trotsky made a grand scapegoat. Recent events have shown that in this respect Russia is still in its Thermidorean period, and the process of finding big and little scapegoats seems to be going on merrily in that country.
The lift of the ideal has gone by now. The new ruling class settles down to do as good a job as it can. But it clearly intends also to enjoy life, to possess the privileges and wealth a ruling class has hitherto always had. This new ruling class is certainly not going to try to achieve Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, for everyone in the society. It is quite content with the stratification which has worked itself out during the revolution. It will settle its own internal conflicts as far as it can, in the traditional way of ruling classes. There will be none of the dangerous direct appeals to the people, no risks of great popular uprisings. We have already noted how as the crisis period approaches the people come less and less into active politics, how the extremists reach power through what is no more than a _coup d’état_. With the Thermidoreans this process continues, until the political changes, the transfers of power during this period--and they are numerous, and by no means altogether regular and orderly--are hardly more than palace revolutions. When all is quiet and safe the victors will risk a plebiscite. Appearances have to be kept up, and a certain number of stereotypes about the will of the people have by now got fairly well established in the mind of John Jones.
John Jones may well be somewhat tired of political turmoil. But he is 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.