Trump's Thermidor
Amid the Greenland farce, a crisis without answers.
Thermidor is probably the only month of the French Republican Calendar Donald Trump would recognise. While Robespierre’s fall is probably unknown to the President, the lobster dish is served at his hotels. All the same, the descent of the administration into equally fearsome and farcical madness mirrors the fall of the Committee of Public Safety. Although it is easy to see the anarchy on the right across the Western world, the world’s greatest revolution teaches us that even if it seems defeated, the crisis it came from is still unanswerable.
The Trump phenomenon bears many similarities to the French Revolution, but chiefly that people in the midst of both always thought they had ended. From the disabled reporter to the Access Hollywood tape, Covid, and January 6th, “normality” has constantly seemed destined to reassert itself, but it never has. In the same manner, Louis XVI told his brothers in 1791 that “La Révolution est finie” and would be executed a year and a half later. The great Girondin orator Vergniaud expressed a similar sentiment, saying, “On ne cesse depuis quelque temps de crier que la Révolution est faite.” He would rise and fall before being executed eleven months after his former king; the Revolution kept on going.
The question posed in France from 1789 and in the West since 2016 has been, “What is the nation?” Burke famously thought the political nation were the nobles who fled France, with the new regimes being robbers in the house. In modern times, we hear a similar sentiment from centrists who think the banishment of established expertise and norms by populists presents an affront not only to society but to civilisation itself. On the other hand, cries of “globalist” are inescapable, as elites are said to have abandoned their compatriots. While it may seem like the end of a cycle as Trump buries his domestic and foreign leverage in pursuit of Greenland, this question will still have to be answered.
Like all revolutions which destroy the previous totems of societal control, the extremes of society have been exposed and have begun to drive significant parts of the population into anarchic purity spirals. On the modern Western right, the proliferation of pro-Nazi streamers, bizarre manosphere ritualists, and ethno-nationalists has overtaken social media, with networks and party lines dismantled. This Tate and Fuentes led kaleidoscope-cum-freak show, although immensely damaging, has become inseparable from Trump and the New Right as a whole.
In the French Revolution, the victory of radical revolutionaries heralded the same thing. The radical Hébertists were the party of a guerre à outrance—an all-out war—against humanity’s enemies and the aristocracy of merchants. Even the equally famed and reviled Committee of Public Safety had to clamp down on the thug-like excesses of the fanatics at the Revolution’s heart. Unlike even Robespierre, Trump refuses to act against the ugliest symptoms of his movement. He is far more powerful than the most famous revolutionary who ruled as one of twelve and died as one of three. Both share the same belief in themselves, but being of the 18th century at least Robespierre could justify all his actions for a system. In the 21st justification and personality are one and the same.
Returning to Thermidor 1794, in the popular narrative of the French Revolution it marks the end of a process begun at the fall of the Bastille: the Revolution had finally stopped radicalising. Like so many historical periods, this change had already taken place long before the celebrated event. The fall of the Hébertists represented the return of central authority over insurgents after five long years: “The Revolution would henceforth be the work of government, not an upheaval from below.”
Thermidor happened in the light of both this and the rest of the Terror and, although mythologised as a victory for moderation, was carried out by the bloodthirsty radicals left over from the Hébertists. Collot d’Herbois, Fouché, and Carrier were together responsible for the most infamous bloodshed of the entire Revolution, at Lyons and Nantes respectively. It was their alliance with the “moderate” faction which led to Robespierre’s fall.
Trump’s own Thermidor will be after the midterms, when a Democratic Congress investigates corruption and probably attempts to impeach him. It won’t have the drama of Robespierre being drowned out by boos in the Convention, but will be both more boring and complete. At the same time, the radical spirits of the revolution will attack him for betraying the revolution, or for simply being weak. Like the Directory which followed Robespierre’s fall, no system can corral the angry currents of Western politics. What follows will still have to answer, “What is the nation?” but on both sides of the Atlantic, none have an answer. The walls of the polity may be rebuilt, but will only enclose another wilderness.