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.

Within a few days of the guillotining of Robespierre and his more conspicuous followers Parisians began to indulge publicly and with gusto in a whole series of pleasures denied them during the tension of the Terror. Politicians may have thought that “Terror will not cease to be the order of the day until the last enemies of the Republic have perished,” but ordinary men and women for once imposed their obvious wants and needs directly on the politicians. One gets the impression that few phenomena in the course of the French revolution were more genuinely “popular” and “spontaneous” than the revulsion from the restraints of the Terror. The people of Paris took Robespierre’s death as a signal that the lid was off.

Dance halls were opened up all over Paris, prostitutes began operating “with their former audacity” (to quote a police report), well-dressed prosperous young men most unrepublicanly drunk began running about and cracking dour, virtuous Republicans over the head. These young men were the famous jeunesse dorée, a gilded youth with no illusions about a Republic of Virtue, and which would nowadays certainly be labeled Fascist at once. Both male and female costume had during the crisis period tended towards sobriety, the women being wrapped in flowing Roman robes and in more than Roman virtue. Now all was changed. The men’s clothes became extremely foppish, with tight trousers, elaborate waistcoats, and stocks that mounted beyond the chin. The women’s dressmakers were still classically inspired, but with a sure erotic sense they concentrated their efforts on the skillful revealing of the breasts. The costume directoire is an excellent symbol of the period.

With the abandonment of price-fixing and in the inflation which followed, a class of newly rich speculators, war profiteers and clever politicians arose. Parliamentary scandals do indeed crop up in earlier periods of the revolutions, even in the crisis period. Corruption can be pretty well proved for certain members of the English Long Parliament and the French Convention even in their great days. But in these earlier periods exposure was followed by swift and sure punishment. Now, in Thermidor, no one seems to care very much and certainly nothing is done. There is gossip, and in some quarters indignation. But mostly politicians who grafted successfully were admired, as they later were to be in the United States.

Still jittery over the Terror, fearing its return, uncertain of their wealth and position, often quite uneducated in the patrician arts, the Thermidoreans spent their money freely and vulgarly. They gambled, they raced horses and fought cocks, they were mad about dancing. All this they did noisily and with little regard for the traditional decencies of the eighteenth century. In these short years the real basis for the romantic taste of nineteenth-century France was laid. The ladies of the period are famous for their gaiety and abandon. Their leader was Teresia de Cabarrus, once mistress of the corrupt representative Tallien, and now his wife. She was universally known, in a phrase that displays the cynicism of the age, as “Our Lady of Thermidor.”

All of us know the age of Charles II as an extreme reaction from the rule of the Saints. Restoration drama has, especially since Victorian times, been a symbol for naughtiness, for the kind of play no nice person could witness without blushing. Nell Gwyn has, in the national memory, ruled in triumph over a court life in which vice was as aristocratic as the most virtuous commoner could wish and suspect it to be. As a matter of fact, the Puritan code of manners and morals was never perfectly established, even in the years immediately following the death of Charles I. The less public pleasures were always possible, and prohibitions against horse-racing, bear-baiting, Christmas and other heathen festivals were subject to the same kind of nullification the Eighteenth Amendment received in this country. The very harshness of some of the Puritan prohibitions was in itself an indication that the Puritans were having a hard time getting all Englishmen to behave in such a way that they would not “stink in the nostrils of the just.”

Yet the Puritan rule was in fact harsh and rigid enough to give non-Puritans plenty of grievances, and in its main lines the Thermidorean reaction was as real in England as it was to be in France. There was not in England the same mixture of parvenus and tired and lucky aristocrats as in France, and esthetically speaking the reaction in England was on a much higher lever than that in France. But in the frank return to the pleasures of the senses, to gambling, drinking, dancing, open love-making, to a light and cynical literature, to a frank joy in clothes and other vanities, the two countries present a very close parallel. Nor was the English Restoration altogether without a lushness of taste which chaster souls find offensive. Especially in female costume the contrast to the sobrieties of the early period is very striking. The ladies wore dresses of riotous and often conflicting colors, put on towering lace headdresses, fantastic patches and generous cosmetics on their faces, wore and displayed elaborately brocaded petticoats.

We need hardly labor this point about the loosening of moral restraints in the Thermidorean period in England and in France. We shall have to be more careful in establishing the facts about any such loosening of moral restraints in Soviet Russia. Here the facts are certainly not yet clear in the histories. Kindly and not very earthy souls like the Webbs see in Russia today an orderly society, half-workshop and half-nursery. Disillusioned radicals like Mr. Eugene Lyons see most of the major public sins of capitalistic countries magnified among the bureaucrats of Stalin’s gang, and the minor private vices, especially those of ostentation and comfort-seeking, at least as common among these bureaucrats as among our own corrupt middle classes. It does seem reasonably clear that no such striking and rapid shift from the public pursuit of virtue to the public pursuit of pleasure has taken place in Russia as took place in France and in England. But again we must not expect our uniformities to be suspiciously exact. In its broad lines, the Russian Thermidor runs as true to form morally and socially as we have seen it does politically.

In the first place, Thermidor in Russia began in Lenin’s own lifetime, with the coming of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Private property and private trading were once more permitted in Russia. The new class of entrepreneurs who rose out of this situation, the Nepmen, remind one forcibly of the similar class of profiteers who rose in France out of the abandonment of price-fixing after the fall of Robespierre. They were never quite sure of their status, and they carried over into their now legal activities a good many of the habits they had acquired in their bootlegging days under the Terror. As a class, they were “exceptionally vulgar, profiteering, crude, and noisy.” In the next few years prostitution, gambling, and other un-Marxist pleasures returned so obviously to Moscow and Leningrad that only the most convinced of “fellow-travelers” were unable to see them. Most foreigners in Russia since 1917 have perhaps been prevented from what we may hopefully call the normal use of their eyesight less by the activities of Communist officials entrusted with the task of guiding foreigners than by their own strong religious conviction that all must be well in the Marxist heaven. Yet until the Five Year Plan was initiated, the return of the bourgeois vices was so obvious, especially in the middle twenties, that even foreign Communists noticed the fact.

Stalin’s apparent return to Communism in 1928-29 is really no more significant than Napoleon’s apparent repudiation of the corruptness and moral looseness of the Directory once he had achieved secure power by the coup d’état of the 18th Brumaire. There seems to be in all our societies a certain reaction to the Thermidorean reaction, notably in this matter of the public pursuit of pleasure. Men in great numbers can no more devote themselves heroically and permanently to sin than to holiness. The thousand dance halls said to have been opened up in Paris immediately after the Terror could have kept going profitably only if most of the population of Paris wanted to dance most of the time. And in spite of Anglo-Saxon ideas to the contrary, Parisians are really not built that way.

What happens in the years following the crisis of the Terror is a kind of seesaw between moral restraint and moral looseness, at the end of which a kind of equilibrium is arrived at in which most men and women behave in respect to such matters as gambling, drinking, love-making, the adornment of their persons, and the use of leisure, about the way their grandfathers and grandmothers had behaved. If we look at Stalin’s Russia and ask ourselves how far there seems to be opportunity for the old Adam and the old Eve to come out in the lives of Russians we shall get a more accurate measure of the reality of Thermidor in Russia than we could get from any amount of Marxist or anti-Marxist theorizing.

Mr. Eugene Lyons tells with malicious delight the story of the bafflement and anger of a correspondent of the New York Jewish Freiheit, a Communist paper, when he was excluded from a government reception in Russia because he did not have a dinner jacket. Dinner jackets a part of the dictatorship of the proletariat! Nothing could be more absurd, illogical and wholly natural. The dinner jacket satisfies a number of human needs—the anthropologist could analyze most of them for you—and there seems to be no evidence that any of our revolutions had much long-run effect on these needs. A commissar needs a dinner jacket at least as much as a Congressman or a D.A.R. lecturer.

Detail after detail might be brought forward to show how the dictatorship of the proletariat in contemporary Russia is by no means the dictatorship of virtue we have seen prevailing in the crisis periods of our revolutions. Jazz, for instance, was long prohibited in Russia. Jazz was clearly the product of a decadent bourgeois civilization, an indecent way of stimulating what no good Marxist would want, or need, to have stimulated, one of the protean forms of “opium for the people” in capitalistic countries. Communists would dance from sheer joy to innocent, spring-like music. In the late twenties, however, the fox-trot and similar dances began to seep into Communist Russia, and nowadays we are told that American dance music is played as frequently and as badly in Russia as in the rest of Europe.

No one dramatic event like the fall of Robespierre can be used to date Thermidor in Russia. But a whole series of little matters of daily life combine to make an impressive case for the reality of the Russian reaction. A youth leader appears at a national youth congress in a necktie, a step which when first taken must have been as shocking as would be in this country the appearance of a Commencement speaker in overalls. A fashion show is held in Moscow, and mannequins actually parade, gliding and smiling with conventional lack of abandon, almost as if they were poor little wage-slaves in Paris or New York. Lipsticks and other cosmetics begin to appear even in the shops patronized by working girls. Stories of crime, “human interest” stories, begin to appear in the pages of newspapers hitherto superior to such capitalistic drivel, and hitherto consecrated to the pure heights of politics. Movies are made in which are to be seen recognizable human beings, insignificant, comic, stupid, jealous, even Russian, rather than bloodless abstractions representing Capitalism, the Landlord, Communism, the Proletariat, Man in Revolt.

The Bolsheviks had been very superior about the family. It was an institution of the old regime, interwoven with all sorts of religious elements, inevitably conservative in its social action. The family was a stuffy little nest breeding selfishness, jealousy, love of property, indifference towards the great needs of society. The family kept the young indoctrinated with the stupidities of the old. The Bolsheviks would break up the family, encourage divorce, educate the children to the true selflessness of Communism, get them used to collective enterprises and collective social life, get rid of the influence of the church in family relations. Now there seems to be no doubt that in contemporary Russia Stalin’s government is deliberately attempting to inculcate the old family virtues. Movies, plays, novels have restored respect for parents, the old family ties, to honor again. Gallantry towards women seems to be coming back; and gallantry towards women is a shocking survival of feudalism, a symbol of their inferior position in society. Divorce, once about as easy and inexpensive as it could possibly be, has now been made more expensive and more difficult. More important, the government seems to be encouraging the spread of a sentiment that marriage is a serious and permanent affair, something made in heaven as heaven now seems understood in Russia. Abortion, which the old Bolsheviks proudly made as legal and as easy as appendectomy in America, and almost as frequent, has now been forbidden by law save where it can be certified as necessary to preserve the woman’s life. Stalin is actually taking measures to encourage large families. And underlying these various measures, and much more important as a general indication of what is going on in Russia than any one of them, is an atmosphere we should almost call Victorian. The present rulers of Russia seem to be trying deliberately to cultivate the kind of sentiments characteristic of societies in equilibrium—the domestic affections, simple patriotism, love of work and routine, obedience to those in power, dislike for individual eccentricities, in short, what Pareto called the “persistent aggregates.”

Pursuing these ends, Stalin has recently decreed that Marxist debunking of Russian history is to cease, that Russians are once more to learn of the glories of the Russian past. The Byzantine missionaries who brought Christianity to Russia are no longer to be painted as fools and villains, agents of what was clearly capitalistic imperialism, abject persons like contemporary missionaries bringing Bible, rum and syphilis to the South Seas. On the contrary, Christianity in Russia is to be seen as an essential step in preparing the barbarous Slavs for higher things. Peter the Great and Catherine are no longer to be made cruel despots. They, too, were great architects of Russia’s destiny, without whom millions of other Slavs and Asiatics might not now enjoy the blessings of Communism. Perhaps Stalin hopes that his people will love him the more, once they learn how many other Stalins have in the past ruled over them as Czars.