No such confident conclusion seems safe in 1938. It is very difficult indeed to get trustworthy information on the present status of organized Christianity in Russia. On this subject, even more than on most subjects, Westerners traveling in Russia find what they want to find. But it does seem definitely established that now after twenty years of Bolshevik supremacy Christianity has not been wiped out in Russia, is not even limited to older people brought up before the revolution. The League of the Militant Godless announced in 1930 that the government had closed only 3,380 out of the 50,000 churches of Czarist Russia. At the tenth anniversary meeting of the League, the president stated that 50 per cent of Russian youth were still Christian. In 1936 the League complained that priests in various parts of Russia have cleverly adapted themselves to Communism, have insinuated themselves into the collective farms, have taken to appearing at trade-union meetings. A recent Catholic traveler reported in the Commonweal that in a conducted tour he was not shown any of the famous “atheist museums” and that on inquiry he found that the whole business of anti-Christian propaganda was being very much soft-pedaled.
On every hand one finds bits of evidence all pointing to the same conclusion: under the Thermidorean rule of Stalin, the Orthodox Church is gradually coming back into a recognized and secure position in Russian life. This is not to say that the Militant Godless are not still active, nor that they will in their turn find themselves persecuted. Nor is it to assert that the Orthodox Church is today exactly what it was in the days of the Czars. On the contrary, it is evident that its clergy, once known for their conservatism and inaction, have been stirred to a real effort of adaptation to new circumstances. But it does mean that the rites of the church still go on in a Russia no longer perhaps exactly the Holy Russia of old, but by no means cut off from an institution identified with a thousand years of her history.
In France the reconciliation of the Thermidoreans and the old church went on so rapidly that within less than a decade from the “dechristianizing” movement of the Terror Napoleon could sign a Concordat with the Pope which officially re-established Roman Catholicism as the State Church of France. During the worst of the Terror, Catholics in France had had to hold their services in secret, in spite of the fact that freedom of worship was guaranteed by law. With the fall of Robespierre they began to risk public services in the buildings still spared them. As more and more moderates were amnestied, the government became more and more friendly, and the last four years of the eighteenth century saw France with complete religious freedom and with almost complete separation of Church and State. Napoleon and many of the new ruling class felt the need of winning the Catholics over completely, and the formal Concordat was negotiated. The re-established Catholic Church was not, however, in exactly the same legal position as under the old regime, when it had been the sole recognized faith. Protestants and Jews were by the new laws given equal status with the Catholics.
Organized Christianity does not enter in the same way into the American revolution. In England, however, there is a striking similarity to the broad lines of development in France and Russia. The established faith of the old regime was the Church of England, in many ways, liturgically, theologically, governmentally, not very far removed from the Catholic tradition. The new revolutionary faith was Calvinism in its various forms, of which the Independent finally triumphed. Under Independent rule the Anglican worship, and indeed rival forms of Calvinist worship, were kept down. On paper, at least, this religious persecution was even more violent than that in France and in Russia. The disputants in the pamphlet warfare among the sects were learned men with abundant vocabularies and firm convictions. On the other hand, save in Ireland, there was rather less violence and bloodshed in immediately religious quarrels during the English revolution than in those of France and Russia. With the repressing of the more radical sects, and especially the Quakers, the swing back begins in England. In the later years of Cromwell Presbyterians and even Anglicans reasserted themselves in public life and carried on their religious services in virtual freedom. When Charles II came back the Church of England was re-established in very nearly its old prestige and privileges, and the cycle took its usual form with the persecution of the sects that had made the revolution.
The history of the accepted religious faiths of the old regimes is then one of the very clearest uniformities our study of revolutions affords. One might almost make a graph, in which the prestige of the old organized faith might be seen to follow a fairly regular curve, lowest at the worst of the Terror, gradually climbing back during the Thermidorean reaction to a position almost as high as that from which it had started in the old regime. Such a graph would be deceptively simple, especially if its interpretation involved the notion that the restored church was exactly its old self once more. Neither men nor institutions pass through the crisis of revolution unchanged. The priests who had undergone persecution were never afterwards the same men who had once enjoyed the security of the old regime, any more than the _émigrés_ who returned from exile were the same men who had once been unchallenged members of a ruling class. We shall later consider the transformation of institutions apparently restored after the revolution. Here we may say a word about the _émigré_ priests, nobles, rich men, whose return to public life is one of the characteristic phenomena of Thermidor.
It would be most satisfying morally to conclude that the old clergy return purified and strengthened by the test of persecution and exile, that the old rulers return chastened and wise. But no such conclusion seems possible. There are exceptions, like the Duc de Richelieu, who had learned moderation and the art of ruling men during his long exile in Russia, and who returned to serve Louis XVIII faithfully but well. In general, however, the religious as well as the moral and political sentiments and ideas of the _émigrés_ are narrowed, intensified, strained into complete unpliability by the bitterness of their lot. The Catholicism of Joseph de Maistre has a rigidity and harshness not common in the faith into which he had grown up during the old regime.
For only in the world of the Alger books is adversity always a good teacher. In the world into which the English Royalists, the French and Russian _émigrés_, were thrust, adversity on the whole taught romantic and unquestioning acceptance of loyalties which they thought were old, but which were really new and high-powered abstractions drawn from their recent experiences in the arena. They returned having forgotten much and having learned a great deal--mostly knowledge neither useful nor realistic. This whole subject of what happens to the _émigrés_ and to the defeated, cowed moderates, is a fascinating one, and one which deserves to be further studied by competent persons. In spite of much good research at the level of narrative history, it remains one of the most obscure parts of the sociology of revolution. But in any case the returned _émigrés_ do not have the field to themselves, do not by any means determine the final course of the reaction to the revolution. Even in England in 1660 and in France in 1814, the more extreme among the returned _émigrés_ did not get things done as they wanted them. The Downings and the Albemarles, the Talleyrands and the Fouchés, the men on the scene, had got much too far ahead of them.
_IV. The Search for Pleasure_
The full flavor of the Thermidorean reaction is reserved for the social historian. In the dress, amusements, in the petty details of the daily lives of ordinary men and women, the full extent of the popular abandonment of the Republic of Virtue becomes clear. So marked is this let-down that even the historian feels it, and most nineteenth-century liberal historians hardly concealed their disgust and disappointment when they came to record the indecent pleasures of the English Restoration or of the French Directory. The austerities of the good life according to Calvin or Robespierre seemed a noble standard, a goal towards which men might struggle with a heroism that adorns a work of history. The doings of a society in which a Nell Gwyn or a Teresa de Cabarrus were apparently the most important actors could hardly be edifying to anybody, and could be made instructive only with the addition of proper sermonizing. Scandal writers, romantic biographers, and other purveyors to a corrupt public taste have of course fallen with delight on the ripe tidbits of the Thermidors, but the high-minded men who write serious history have passed by these periods holding their hands to their noses. From one source or another, however, we can find what we need to know about the social history of our societies in this particular phase of revolution. We shall try to avoid being shocked or titillated, and to see how the obvious moral looseness of the Thermidorean reactions fits in with the uniformities we have been working out. But first for a brief review of the facts.