286
11 }
Rapprochement with the United States
End of Utopian Terror and Defense of the New Revolutionary OrderRevolutions typically reach a point when they turn away from extreme coer-
cive measures previously deemed necessary to usher in a new equalitarian and
virtuous social order. The utopian vision that earlier inspired upheaval now
seems less attainable and the costs of trying unacceptably high. Revolutions
also at some point turn away from direct assaults by large numbers of ordi-
nary people on established institutions of power and privilege, and toward
construction of a stable post-revolutionary order. Protecting the gains of the
revolution is now deemed to require a return to stable, hierarchical bureau-
cratic organization. External enemies of the revolution often pose as great a
threat as internal enemies.
In the French Revolution these shifts are usually traced to July 1794, the
month of Thermidor under the revolutionary calendar, when Maximilien
Robespierre and other leading Jacobins were arrested, then executed.
The Paris Commune, center of power for the city’s poor, was dissolved.
Revolutionary tribunals, key instruments of the Terror, were abolished and
the Committee of Public Safety, which had guided the Terror, greatly reduced
in power. Mob rule, which had periodically erupted to push the revolution
in radical directions, began to recede. Displays of wealth once again became
common. Émigrés who had fled the Terror began to return to France. And
France’s leaders began worrying about how to protect the new order created
by the great upheaval that had just occurred. All this happened with powerful
armies of the monarchical powers of Europe still marshaled on the northern
borders of the French Republic.^1
The Thermidor of the Chinese revolution is probably best situated in fall
1968, when Mao Zedong ordered “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams”
led by the PLA into schools, factories, and offices across China. Those
Propaganda Teams set up new Revolutionary Committees that increas-
ingly operated like party committees in an ordinary Leninist system. CCP