V. Summary

Thermidor is then not by any means something unique, limited to the French revolution from which it takes its name. We have found in all three of our societies which underwent the full cycle of revolution a similar moral let-down, a similar process of concentration of power in the hands of a “tyrant” or “dictator,” a similar seeping back of exiles, a similar revulsion against the men who had made the Terror, a similar return to old habits in daily life.

Even in the United States, which did not undergo quite the same sort of crisis as the other countries, which did not have a real Reign of Terror and Virtue, the decade of the 1780’s displays in incomplete forms some of the marks of Thermidor. There were a relaxation of war discipline and war tension and a grand renewed scramble for wealth and pleasure. There were much financial speculation and much sheer suffering. Shays’s Rebellion, a most ineffectual gesture, reminds one of the feeble attempts of suffering Frenchmen and Russians to protest against the newly rich of their Thermidors. There was even a moral let-down in this country. “Sober Americans of 1784,” writes Jameson, “lamented the spirit of speculation which war and its attendant disturbances had generated, the restlessness of the young, disrespect for tradition and authority, increase of crime, the frivolity and extravagance of society.” All this sounds very like the original Thermidor in France.

In some sense the phenomenon of reaction and restoration seems almost inevitably a part of the process of revolution. At any rate it seems hard for the most optimistic lover of revolution to deny that we have found such a phenomenon in all of the four societies we have chosen to study. The very, very faithful may still maintain that the great revolution in Russia has proved itself exempt from this reaction, that in Russia the noble aims of revolutionists in Western society have at last achieved an unsullied reality. We ourselves cannot fit the facts of Stalin’s regime to any such interpretation. Yet the fact of Thermidor, even the fact of formal restoration as in 1660 and 1814, does not mean that revolution has changed nothing. We shall in the next chapter attempt to answer the very difficult question: Just what changes did these revolutions effect?