America’s Thermidorian Reaction
Part 1

4,113 words

In summer 1789, King Louis XVI of France summoned the Estates General to Versailles in order to solve France’s deepening financial crisis. The Estates General consisted of the First Estate representing the clergy, the Second Estate representing the nobility, and the Third Estate representing everyone else. Seeing themselves as the legitimate representatives of the people of France, the Third Estate rebelled, forming a separate governing body known as the National Assembly in opposition to the King’s absolute rule.

Louis XVI attempted to end the rebellion of the Third Estate by force but was met with a popular uprising in support of the Third Estate, climaxing with the Storming of the Bastille on July 14th, 1789. With segments of the army siding with the Third Estate, Louis was forced to give into their demands, signing a new constitution which granted the National Assembly legitimate governing powers. This was the beginning of the first phase of the French Revolution.

Five years later, France found itself gripped by a brutal reign of revolutionary terror under the 12-man Committee of Public Safety, led by the radical revolutionary Maximilian Robespierre. The King was dead, the monarchy had been abolished, the church had been shut down, and scores of people were being hauled off the guillotine daily. Nobles, clergymen, and royalists had already met their maker courtesy of the guillotine’s blade or had been forced into exile to avoid such a fate. Now it was the moderate revolutionaries who were quite literally next on the chopping block.

After months of a constant tide of executions, some revolutionaries in the National Convention began to worry for their own safety. On July 26th, 1794, Robespierre gave a speech to the convention, accusing several deputies of taking part in a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, but held off naming them until the following day. Fearing another purge, deputies shouted down Robespierre before he could deliver his speech the following day on July 27th, drove him out of the building, then swiftly voted for his arrest and execution.

Robespierre and his allies in the Committee of Public Safety suffered the same fate which they had condemned thousands to on July 28th at the guillotine. In turn, the far-left Jacobin club was dissolved as most leading members had been executed, the Sans-Coulotte paramilitaries which had supported them were disbanded, and the Reign of Terror came to an end. For a more detailed description of Robespierre’s political career and one particularly hilarious mishap which contributed to his downfall, you can read my essay titled When Robespierre Posted Cringe.

The events which led to the overthrow of Robespierre and the end of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution have been dubbed the Thermidorian Reaction by historians. This name is derived from the French Revolutionary Calendar which renamed the days of the week and months of the year, and began counting years from the date of the declaration of the French First Republic. According to the Revolutionary Calendar, Robespierre’s overthrow in the National Convention took place on the 9th of Thermidor, in year II. To understand what the Thermidorian Reaction really was, it’s first important to understand what it was not.

The Thermidorian Reaction was not a counterrevolution. It did not restore the Ancien Regime of the Bourbon Monarchy, and it was not the end of the French Revolution nor the regime which the revolution had been brought about. Those who carried out the Thermidorian Reaction were not counterrevolutionaries. They were in fact revolutionaries themselves who had supported the 1789 Revolution, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792, and in some cases, they were even initial supporters of the Reign of Terror.

The Thermidorian Reaction was a reaction to the excesses of the revolutionary regime, in particular the Reign of Terror which had claimed around 40,000 lives at that point. By summer 1794, after the right and the centre had already been ruthlessly supressed via the revolutionary terror, the centre-left began to fear that they would be next. No matter how emphatically you believe in “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”, losing your head is never in your best interests. So, the Thermidorians, some of whom had earlier been advocates of the terror, made their move before they too met with the great razor.

It wasn’t the end of all political persecution under the revolutionary regime as the far-left faction were themselves purged following the 9th of Thermidor, but it halted the daily en masse executions which had been going on for months at that point. While many of the Thermidorians were in fact culpable for the terror themselves, they were able to push the blame onto Robespierre and his allies and wash their hands of the blood flowing through the streets of Paris. Their support for the terror ended at the point where their own safety was at risk and since Robespierre was no longer alive to defend himself, they got away with it.

Following the Thermidorian Reaction, a new incarnation of the revolutionary regime was formed in 1795 known as the Directory, ruled by five directors periodically elected by the assembly. The Directory was a republican regime based on the premises of the revolution, but a much more moderate one that the previous incarnation ruled by the Jacobins. Dechristianization wasn’t reversed, but the harsh persecution of the church was relaxed. The monarchy wasn’t restored, but royalists were again allowed to voice support for its restoration without facing imminent death.

The Directory faced challenges to their power by both left-wing Jacobins and right-wing royalists which they supressed by force, but the mass executions of the Reign of Terror weren’t resumed. The Directory ruled France for four years before it was overthrown by Napoleon Bonapart in 1799, bringing an end to the revolutionary regime. Some might consider Napoleonic France to be a continuation of the revolutionary regime, but for the purposes of this essay, I will consider it a separate one. While Napoleon incorporated many revolutionary ideas into his government, he rolled back the most radical aspects of the French Revolution to a great extent.

History might not always repeat itself, but it rhymes. Many parallels can be drawn both between the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 and between the revolutionary regime in France and the Soviet Union. The period during the Soviet Era which bears the most resemblance to the Reign of Terror and during the French Revolutionary Era is the rule of Joseph Stalin. Following the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Stalin rose to power and established himself as the absolute ruler of the USSR over the course of several years.

During his reign, Stalin embarked on numerous campaigns of repression and terror designed to consolidate the power of the Soviet state and secure his position at the top of it. This included dekulakization and the forced collectivization of farms, which resulted in the Soviet Famine of 1930-1933, the Great Purge of 1936-1938 during which countless Soviet political leaders, including the Old Bolsheviks who had led the 1917 revolution were executed, and the vast expansion of the Soviet Gulag system. While the most extreme repressions of the Stalin Era took place during the 1930s, they continued throughout WWII and up until Stalin’s death in 1953.

If there were an event comparable to the Thermidorian Reaction which took place during the Soviet era, it would be the process of Destalinization which took place in the years following death of the dictator. This began with the former head of the NKVD and early favourite to replace Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria ordering the release of numerous political prisoners following Stalin’s death in March 1953. In the power struggle which ensued in 1953, Beria was deposed and executed by Nikita Khruschev, another former high-ranking member of Stalin’s government, who would become the new leader of the USSR. Further releases and rehabilitations of political figures persecuted under Stalin took place in the following years.

While Stalin’s reign of terror came to an end after he died, he remained a respected figure in the country and among communists worldwide. This changed following Nikita Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalinism in a speech he delivered to Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. In this speech, Khruschev denounced Stalin’s cult of personality, his handling of WWII, and the excesses of his purges against the Old Bolsheviks and other political leaders. Following the speech, a group of fellow leaders who had held high positions in Stalin’s government attempted to depose Khruschev but were defeated and forced out of the party.

Much like the Thermidorian Reaction, Destalinization was not a counterrevolution. Khruschev was a dyed-in-the-wool communist and accused Stalin of betraying the true tenets of Bolshevism. He did not believe that those tenets were wrong to begin with. However, as was the case during the French Revolution, no matter much you believe in the workers of the world uniting and creating the egalitarian proletarian utopia, you don’t want to be the one to end up on the wrong side of a firing squad.

Khruschev did not condemn dekulakization and Stalin’s brutal forced collectivization of farms which resulted in the famine of the 1930s because Khruschev maintained his belief in Stalin’s economic model. As was the case with the Thermidorians and the Reign of Terror, both Khruschev and Beria were instrumental in carrying out Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s only to attempt to wash their hands of the blood following his death. After Beria was deposed and executed, Khruschev placed a lot of the blame on him as the dead can’t speak, deflecting it from himself.

The timeline of both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution saw an initial burst of energy followed by a period of calm before their ascension to their radical climaxes which came to an end with their respective Thermidorian moments. During the French Revolution, 1789 saw the initial rebellion of the Third Estate, the Drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man, Storming of the Bastille, and numerous other riots and clashes. Following the initial Revolution of 1789, the new revolutionary regime had about two years of calm before its most radical phase set in with the outbreak of war, the fall of the monarchy, and the Reign of Terror. This phase came to an end with the Thermidorian Reaction.

The Russian Revolution also started out with a period of intensity following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 which included the Red Terror against tsarists, liberals, and non-Bolshevik socialists, the Russian Civil War, the policy of War Communism, and the Russian Famine of 1921-1922. This was followed by a few years of relative calm with a reduction in the number of political executions and the implementation of the New Economic Policy, which liberalized the Soviet economy. The most radical phase commenced in the late 1920s after Stalin had fully consolidated his power and implemented forced collectivization and later the Great Purge. The most radical phase continued until Destalinization in the 1950s.

Now, the regimes created in the wake of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution are not exact mirror images of each other. The timeline of the Russian communist regime lasted for 74 years while the French revolutionary regime lasted for only 10. The scope of the events of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Era also far outstretches that of the French Revolutionary Era. For example, the Red Terror, while not as widespread enormous as the terror later enacted by Stalin, still claimed far more victims than the Reign of Terror did in France.

Some analogous events in two eras also fit into different parts of the timeline. While I am of the belief that the Destalinization in the Soviet Union best resembles the Thermidorian Reaction from the French Revolution, some leftists such as Leon Trotsky accused Stalin of being a Thermidorian against the initial Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. While Stalin vastly expanded and centralized the power of the Soviet state and increased the scope of political terror, he did roll back some of the more radical aspects of the initial revolution.

The first Bolshevik government following the revolution was dominated by Jews and other ethnic minorities, embarked on a cultural iconoclasm against the former Russian Empire, and promoted leftist social values such as feminism and homosexuality. They were very internationalist in their outlook and viewed Russia as simply the starting point for their worldwide revolution. The idea was that through a process of worldwide revolution, every country in the world would eventually be part of their Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Stalin implemented a policy of socialism in one country, opting to focus on developing socialism within the USSR rather than promoting revolution worldwide. He also reversed the libertine sexual ethics of early Soviet period and promoted a strong family unit. While the cultural iconoclasm wasn’t totally undone, figures from Russian history such as Alexander Nevsky or Peter the Great were again upheld as symbols of heroism to derive inspiration from. Jewish power in the Soviet Union declined during the Stalin era mostly due to the Great Purge which killed off most of the Old Bolsheviks and numerous other influential figures, the events of WWII, and the crackdown on ethnic nepotism among all ethnic groups, including Jews.

Trotsky’s accusation that Stalin had betrayed the 1917 Revolution as the Thermidorians betrayed the French Revolution is based on the assumption that the most radical elements of both revolutions could have brought about an egalitarian utopia if they hadn’t been interrupted. I view Trotsky as just an ideologue lost in his own Quixotism in this regard. I am of the belief that Stalin’s abandonment of the project of worldwide revolution and his reversal of the radical social reforms which followed the 1917 revolution as him being confronted the reality that these simply wouldn’t work rather than him not genuinely being a Bolshevik. It’s the exact same “that wasn’t real communism” argument you hear from leftists today.

There are also some differences in latter parts of both the Soviet and French Revolutionary Eras. The French Directory was markedly less radical than the Convention dominated by the Jacobins. Leonid Brezhnev was less radical than Khruschev in that he accepted that the utopian goals of communism weren’t going to happen any time soon and just declared that the USSR had successfully developed socialism. However, Brezhnev reversed some of the liberalization of the Khruschev years, though never returned to the extreme totalitarianism of Stalin. The Directory was overthrown by Napoleon in a military coup while the USSR finally ended after the liberal reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev designed to keep it together failed, and the union fell apart.

I believe that both the French Revolutionary Era and the Soviet Era can give us some insight into the present-day United States, how it got to where it is today, and what current events in America might be a sign of. I would consider the United States following the cultural revolution of the 1960s analogous to the French Revolutionary Regime or the Soviet Union. Much like France in 1789 and Russia in 1917, the United States underwent a massive change in the 1960s. The idea of the United States as a European derived nation, both racially and culturally, was replaced with the idea that it was a nation based solely on ideas which anyone, regardless of ancestry, could become part of.

At the root of this was a belief in blank-slate egalitarianism, that race or gender are social constructs which have no bearing on human potential. The assumption of this revolution was that if all else is equal, different groups will have equal outcomes, meaning the existence of unequal outcomes must be the result of injustice. This revolution posited that society has a moral obligation to eliminate these perceived injustices which are holding back certain groups and achieve the goal of equity.

Unlike the French and Russian Revolutions, the cultural revolution in the United States didn’t overthrow the existing government but rather brought about a major change in policy. This cultural revolution was brought about by several factors. First was the aftermath of WWII and the various narratives relating to race, prejudice, and nationalism which emerged in the decades which followed. Another major factor was the rise of the organized Jewish community who supplanted the former WASP establishment in the 1960s and became the most power group in the United States. These factors gave way to the success of several left-wing social causes such as the Civil Rights movement, second wave feminism, and the LGBT movement, and the change in US immigration policy with the Hart-Celler Act of 1965.

The effects of America’s cultural revolution took much longer to manifest themselves but have transformed American society to an even greater degree than the Russian or French revolutions transformed those respective societies. The start date for the French Revolution was 1789 and for the Russian Revolution was 1917. For argument’s sake her, I’m going to place the start date of America’s cultural revolution at 1964, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act which was followed by the Hart-Cellar Act one year later.

As with the two other examples, America’s cultural revolution started off with an initial burst of intensity in the late 60s and 70s when numerous radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, and the hippie movement were active. Much of the radical left was energized in opposition to the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. This period also saw programs such as forced desegregation and the Great Society. The premises of America’s cultural revolution remained in place during 80s, 90s, and 00s, but with less intensity. This changed during Barrack Obama’s second term in office when what has come to be known as the Great Awokening kicked off around 2013.

The French Revolutionary Regime, the Soviet Union, and post-1964 America all have many commonalities. They all took place in countries which were great powers of their time. France was the most powerful country in the world in 1789. The United States was the most powerful country in the world in 1964. Russia wasn’t the most powerful country in the world in 1917, but it was still one of the great empires in Europe at the time. Each of these countries were taken over by universalist egalitarian ideologies which were far to the left of those which had preceded them, in France in the form of radical enlightenment liberalism, in Russia in the form of communism, and in the United States in the form of universalist egalitarianism, which is usually referred to as “wokeism” today.

Another similarity which the present-day United States and its sphere of influence share with these two historical regimes is that they are iconoclastic. Part of all three of these revolutions is the notion that everything which preceded them was illegitimate and unjust. During the French Revolution, as mentioned earlier, they went so far as to creating an entirely new calendar, replacing the death of Christ with the foundation of the republic as the date to count the years from. The idea was that everything which came before was to be condemned. The Russian Revolution also saw an iconoclasm Russia’s cultural heritage and the vilification of everything which came before, though this was partially undone later in the Soviet era.

In America today, the establishment narrative is that United States was built on stolen land off the labour of slaves and that everything in American history before Martin Luther King Jr. taught them not to be racist was irredeemably evil. Other countries in the American sphere of influence are encouraged to carry out the same kind of cultural iconoclasm via their own original sin narratives. In Germany it’s the Holocaust, in Britain it’s the British Empire, in Canada it’s residential schools and so on. These moral indictments are used to delegitimize everything which came before the adoption of these values.

All of these three regimes were expansionist in that they attempted to export the revolution abroad wherever they could. The French Revolutionary Regime was constantly engaged in wars abroad after 1792 during which they attempted to instal similar regimes in other European countries. The Soviet Union attempted to provoke communist revolutions abroad in its early years which was unsuccessful other than in Mongolia. They later installed communist regimes in the countries they conquered in Eastern Europe during WWII and supported armed communist insurrections in the third world during the Cold War. The United States exported its ideology through cultural influence via media and education in countries like Canada, the UK, or West Germany, through international pressure in South Africa or the former Eastern Bloc, and via military force in Serbia, Afghanistan, or Iraq.

It’s difficult to compare the timeline of the United States to that of the USSR and French Revolution. The latter two are historical regime whose timelines are complete, while the former still exists in the present. Nevertheless, I’m going to try to draw parallels between these two historical regimes and the current American regime to theorize what might be happening in the United States and its sphere of influence right now and what we could see coming in the future. This is not an exact science. Again, we don’t know how the future timeline will play out and there’s no guarantee it will resemble those of historical regimes, but I’ll put forth a theory anyway.

If we were to map out the lifespan of the French Revolutionary Regime, it had its initial surge in 1789, a relatively calm period from 1789 to 1792, it’s most radical phase from the deposition of the monarchy in July of 1792 to the Thermidorian Reaction in July 1794. This was followed by another more moderate phase from 1794 to 1799 under the Directory before the regime was overthrown by Napoleon. For Russia and the USSR, it had its initial surge from 1917 to 1921 with the revolution and civil war, a period of relative calm from 1921 to 1928, then entered its most radical phase in 1928 with the beginning of Stalin’s five-year plan. This phase continued until Stalin’s death in 1953 and was followed by a less repressive phase until the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

If I were to do the same for the United States after its cultural revolution, I would put the initial surge from 1964 with the introduction of the Civil Rights Act to 1981 with the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It had its period of relative calm from 1981 to 2013. I would place the beginning of its most radical phase to date in 2013 with the beginning Obama’s second term and the Great Awokening, which continues to the present. I won’t make any concrete predictions but based on the lifecycle of these other two historical regimes, but I will theorize here that Donald Trump’s second presidency could potentially serve as America’s Thermidorian Reaction.

The underlying premises of what we call “woke” today have been dominant in the United States and its sphere of influence dating back to the 1960s. Lyndon Johnson blamed the black riots of the late 1960s on white racism, Richard Nixon passed the some of the earliest affirmative action policies in the 1970s, Ronald Reagan amnestied a huge number of illegal immigrants in the 1980s, and the LA Riots and the OJ Simpson Trial both took place in the 1990s. Similar occurrences could be observed in other Western countries during these years. Wokeism is nothing new. It simply entered a phase of increased radicalism around 2013.

The Great Awokening included the Black Lives Matter movement and the increase of anti-white rhetoric in public life, third-wave feminism and the #MeToo movement, and the continuation of the LGBT movement which increasingly began to emphasize transgenderism. This didn’t only occur in the United States, but other parts of the West such as Canada and Europe simultaneously. The so-called “Syrian Refugee Crisis” of 2015 and the veneration of Muslims can be included as part of the Great Awokening, though this was more prevalent in Europe than the US. The Great Awokening can be mapped by the exponential increase in the use of leftist buzzwords such as “racism”, “sexism”, “homophobia”, or “islamophobia” in the media after 2013. What’s called Cancel Culture today, the ostracization of perceived “bigots”, has also existed for decades but began to claim far more victims following the Great Awokening.

Much like how the most radical phases of the French Revolution and the Soviet Union began once the Jacobins and Joseph Stalin respectively had fully consolidated their power, the Great Awokening kicked off once it looked like this ideology had achieve hegemony. By 2013, the majority of births in the United States were now non-white. Gay marriage was about to be fully legalized. America had elected a non-white president twice in Barrack Obama and appeared poised to elect its first female president in Hillary Clinton. At the time, all indications suggested that the rest of the West would follow this same trajectory.

Enter Donald Trump.