After a revolution reaches the peak of ideological fever, writes Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution the fever breaks, and things return, relatively, to normal. This retreat from frenzy is called "Thermidor" after the fall of Robespierre, the director of the Reign of Terror, in the revolutionary month of Thermidor.
In the English Revolution, Brinton reckons that Thermidor arrived in April 1653 when Cromwell dissolved the Rump parliament and became Protector. Then,
In 1657 Cromwell became Lord Protector, half a king at least, and with the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 the great English Revolution may be said to have ended.
In France the fall of the "incorruptible" Robespierre was brought about in 1793 by a conspiracy among apparently orthodox Jacobins that were involved in war profiteering and the like. Although the conspirators had not intended to end the Terror, the public reaction communicated to the government that the ordinary people were done with it, and the Terror slowly subsided through the Convention and the Directory, until Bonaparte's coup d'état in November 1799.
In the Russian Revolution, Thermidor is more complex. The New Economic Policy of 1921 certainly counts as a relaxation in revolutionary frenzy, but Lenin's death in 1924 led to a rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky and a revival of revolutionary tension. But the enforcement of Five Year Plans and the Great Purge in the 1930s count not as revolutionary but as the normal acts of tyrannous rulers.
The striking commonality in the post Thermidorean period is that the establishment of the monarchical rule of a tyrant.-- even Washington was regarded as a tyrant by some -- should be regarded as normal.
[W]hen "the "silken threads" of habit, tradition, legality are broken, men must be held together by the "iron chains" of dictatorship.
Thus the frenzy of terror is replaced by the more reliable rule of an uncontested ruler that inherits the revolution.
As time goes on, the pressures of the Terror applied to ordinary men are relaxed: the special tribunals give place to more regular ones, the revolutionary police are absorbed into the regular police... and the block, guillotine or firing squad are reserved for more dramatic criminals.
Ordinary people can get on with their ordinary lives, and slowly the politically proscribed are amnestied, or are allowed to return, and even allowed back into public life. The new governing class tend to be "a very miscellaneous lot," but they slowly get the country some sort of normalcy, "once more working."
However, Thermidor does not mean a return to economic normalcy.
One of the most striking uniformities... notably in France and Russia, but to a certain extent 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.
Another thing: the messianic universalism of the revolution and the Terror gets replaced by ordinary nationalism, not excluding a little ordinary war and conquest.
Thermidor also means the rehabilitation of the old church. In England, France, and Russia the established church was cruelly persecuted by the revolutionaries. But in the reaction, the persecutions were relaxed, and the old religion allowed to resume its place in the national culture.
Thermidor meant a return to pleasure, especially in England and France. That is what "Restoration Comedy" was all about in England.
[I]n the frank return to the pleasure 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.
Even in Soviet Russia, in the New Economic Policy period, the "Nepmen" were seen as exceptionally vulgar, and prostitution and gambling returned to Moscow. Of course, Russia seems to be an exception -- even in 1964 in the revised edition of Anatomy -- in that it maintained a "continuous pressure" for decades on the individual to conform or else. There are many reasons that can be found to explain this, but Brinton worries about straying into the realm of "prophecy." Still, he suggests,
The ideas, the promises of orthodox Marxism as now embodied in Russia may well prove in the next few years almost as embarrassing in Russian internal politics as useful in Russian external politics.
Some institutions, some laws, even some humans habits, the clearly changed in very important ways;
Other institutions, etc., not so much.
In the case of France, it can be said that the revolution ended "the worst abuses, the worst inefficiencies of the old regime, that resulted from a "thousand year struggle between the centripetal forces of the Crown and the centrifugal forces of the feudal nobility." The achievement of government efficiency is the most striking common achievements of the revolutions. And the metric system. It is curious that revolutions all launched in the name of freedom ended up merely promoting the efficiency of government. All the revolutions took property from at least some of the previous upper class, and brought some new men into the ruling class, while throwing out some at least of the old ruling class.
And yet how much did the revolutions change life for the ordinary man? The revolutions had grand plans to change the family, religion, and "personal habits," but after the Thermidor the average man stands "on certain matters about where he stood when the revolution began."
What is loosely called the "Industrial Revolution" had certainly a much greater effect, forcing John [Jones] into a more difficult series of adjustments than did our revolutions.
But the revolutions turned "verbal instruments of revolt" into the new myths and rituals or their societies, a mere recitation of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."
Finallt Brinton offers the following uniformities in the four revolutions.
First, the revolutions occurred in societies on the upswing, from the discontented who felt restraint from the old order.
Second, there were "bitter class antagonisms" in each of the prerevolutionary societies.
Third, there is the "transfer of allegiance of the intellectuals" over to the revolution.
Fourth, in a rapidly changing society the old-regime "governmental machinery is clearly inefficient... [and] laid an intolerable strain on governmental machinery adapted to simpler, more primitive, conditions."
Fifth, the old ruling class starts to "lose faith in the traditions and habits of their class". It "becomes politically inept."
Thus, Brinton ends with three major conclusions:
First, there seem to be uniformities between the four revolutions; second, that there is a difference between men's deed and words, for in the crisis they may say one thing and do another; third, that it is not easy to change society, and that the vast effort of revolution and terror fails, and that, after the Thermidorean reaction, society is "not greatly altered."
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