Thermidorian Reaction (915bc103)

The Thermidorian Reaction is the post-revolutionary turn through which an emancipatory upheaval gives way to a more settled order, while its promises and conflicts persist in altered form. The book treats it not simply as the end of revolutionary possibility, but as a disputed historical threshold: accepting the order that follows may enable a new analysis of freedom and social antagonism, yet it may also disguise the failure of a revolution’s universal claims. That tension links the French Revolution’s aftermath to competing accounts of the Soviet transformation under Stalin.

The Post-Revolutionary Turning Point

In Georg Lukács’s reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s philosophical advance depends on coming to terms with the post-Thermidorian epoch and the close of the revolutionary period of bourgeois development. Rather than remain faithful to the early revolutionary ideal as if it could simply be restored, Hegel builds his philosophy from an understanding of the changed historical moment. Lukács contrasts this position with Friedrich Hölderlin’s uncompromising fidelity to the ideal of renewing polis democracy. For Lukács, Hölderlin is broken by a reality that leaves his ideal no place, even in poetry and thought.

The contrast is not merely between political compromise and heroic resistance. The book presents Hegel’s acceptance of the changed present as a condition for moving beyond an ideal of organic community and analyzing the antagonisms of bourgeois civil society. The phrase “the rose in the cross of the present” names the possibility of finding actual freedom within a compromised historical situation, rather than locating freedom in a lost past or an unattained future. Yet the same move carries a danger: recognizing the present as the only available field of action can become an endorsement of the order that has defeated revolutionary hopes.

A Dispute Over Revolutionary Inheritance

The book reads Lukács’s account allegorically against Leon Trotsky’s characterization of Stalinism as the Thermidor of the October Revolution. Lukács accepts the comparison but gives it a positive inflection: rather than lamenting the loss of revolutionary energy, he treats acceptance of its consequences as a way of recognizing the actual space of social progress. The account therefore turns Thermidor from a name for simple retreat into a problem of how revolutionary energies survive after the heroic phase has ended.

That interpretation is also exposed to a critical reversal. In the Marxian account cited by the book, the day after revolutionary intoxication reveals the limits of the bourgeois project: its claim to universal freedom gives way to relations organized around commerce and private property. Read against that account, Lukács’s defense of a Stalinist Thermidor implies, perhaps against his conscious intention, that the proletarian revolution also failed to realize actual freedom, replacing its universal promise with new relations of domination and exploitation. The Thermidorian analogy thus both interprets a historical settlement and raises the question of whether settlement means progress, defeat, or both.

The Soviet Timeline and Its Competing Thermidors

The book presents no single uncontested date for the Soviet Thermidor. Sheila Fitzpatrick argues that collectivization and rapid industrialization were part of the October Revolution’s own dynamic, so that the revolutionary sequence proper ended only in 1937. In this account, the decisive Thermidor came when the great purges were cut short, preventing what Getty and Naumov called the complete “suicide of the party” and allowing the Party nomenklatura to stabilize as a new class.

This periodization distinguishes the social effects of successive phases. From 1917 to 1921, society remained in a state of emergency. The New Economic Policy then consolidated Soviet state power, but left much of the social body—including peasants, artisans, and intellectuals—basically intact. The thrust beginning in 1928, by contrast, aimed directly at changing that social composition: it liquidated peasants as a class of individual owners and replaced the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians with a new one. Fitzpatrick’s comparison makes the transformation concrete: someone returning to Moscow in 1924 after leaving in 1914 would still recognize the city’s shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, those in charge; returning in 1934, that same emigrant would find the texture of social life transformed beyond recognition.

The account preserves a tension between the horrors of this transformation and the revolutionary will that drove it. The violence of the years after 1929 did not, in this reading, amount only to bureaucratic consolidation: it accompanied a sincere and enthusiastic effort to remake society and create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system. At the same time, the cessation of the purges marks the point at which the nomenklatura secures a stable position. The resulting order can therefore appear both as the culmination of revolutionary transformation and as the settlement that curtails it.

Revolution Turned Inward

Isaac Deutscher’s account supplies a causal explanation for the inward direction of Soviet transformation. The revolutionary force, unable to expand beyond the Soviet Union, turned inward and began violently reshaping Soviet society. Forced industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution, while the liquidation of the Russian kulaks served as a substitute for overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad. The book compares this redirection to Karl Marx’s account of the Napoleonic Wars as an export of revolutionary activity after Thermidor had quenched domestic agitation, but distinguishes the Soviet case as a thrust inward rather than outward.

That distinction also revises the analogy with Napoleon. The book locates the specifically Napoleonic moment in the failed attempt to export revolution by military means at the end of the civil war in 1920, when the Red Army was defeated in Poland. On this reading, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, rather than Stalin, was the potential Bolshevik Napoleon. The Soviet Thermidor is consequently not a simple replay of the French sequence: revolutionary energy is redirected by confinement within one country, first into social transformation and then into the stabilization of a new ruling stratum.

Historical Meaning and Limits

The book rejects both the view that Stalinism was merely a contingent deviation from an otherwise intact revolutionary project and the view that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Its proposed task is to think the tragedy of the October Revolution without erasing either its emancipatory potential or the historical necessity attributed to its Stalinist outcome. Thermidor becomes the name for that unresolved relation: the revolution’s inheritance persists, but in forms that can reproduce domination as well as transform society.

This framework makes the period a test of how political change is judged. Acceptance of a post-revolutionary present may disclose freedoms and antagonisms that an idealized return to the past cannot grasp; it may also turn defeat into a story of necessary progress. The Soviet chronology intensifies the problem: a revolutionary process can continue to remake the social body after its original international horizon has closed, while the eventual stabilization of its leadership marks a new limit. The Thermidorian Reaction therefore signifies not just a retreat from revolution, but a contested passage in which its energies, achievements, and failures become difficult to separate.