472 Chapter XIX
lution became a kind of miracle for the correction of social ills. The Convention
even created, for future use, the idea of gouvernement révolutionnaire: the theory of
a revolutionary dictatorship, exercising special or emergency powers under no con-
trols, as a “temporary” device for the introduction of constitutional government or
a new peaceable and secure form of society. That Robespierre and the Revolution-
ary Government of 1793–1794 genuinely intended their powers to be temporary,
“until the peace,” cannot be doubted. There was no hypocrisy in this respect. But it
seems likely also, as matters actually worked out, that there could have been no
transition to constitutional liberties as long as Robespierre lived.
Thermidor in a way was a positive vindication of the Revolution. The basically
liberal and constitutionalist ideas of the whole revolutionary era reasserted them-
selves. For the adherents of monarchy and aristocracy, the Reign of Terror had in
fact been a piece of remarkable good fortune. It “proved” what they wanted to
know—that a republic, in a large, powerful, and civilized country, was an impossi-
ble, anarchic, dictatorial, and bloodthirsty kind of regime. A republic in France that
could function without Terror was not exactly what conservative Europe wanted.
As the American writer, W. E. B. DuBois, once remarked of South Carolina dur-
ing Reconstruction: “If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than
bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.”^38 Somewhat the same
holds for conservative Europe and republican France. If there was one thing that
conservatives, at least of the unregenerate kind, wanted less than the Republic with
the Terror, it was the Republic without the Terror.
For friends of the French Revolution, in Europe and America, the relaxation of
dictatorship and the closing down of the guillotine brought relief. Freed after
Thermidor of the incubus of political bloodshed, the Republic became an inspira-
tion for analogous developments in other countries.
38 Black Reconstruction in America (New York, 1935), 428.