The Thermidor revolt that raised the Directory and the coup of Brumaire that felled it are often collapsed into each other. A smooth line connecting the fall of the Jacobins to Bonapartism often leaves the Directory little more than an interregnum. However, drawing this line is a mistake. The coup that brought Bonaparte to power was not borne from compromise or crisis-fighting: it was the greatest pronunciamento history has ever seen. Thermidor, however, was different. The Thermidorians were not upstart generals or unreconstructed reactionaries, despite the moniker. Authoritarian firefighters who improvised their way out of collapse, again and again they beat back challenges from left and right, ultimately producing a short-lived and fragile stability in the wake of the Reign of Terror.
This is not an essay about the French Revolution - it is Charles Maier’s classic Recasting Bourgeois Europe I want to write about. However, a brief sojourn to 1794 is needed, if because while Maier may not be concerned with the French Revolution, he is with Thermidor; or at least, the “world-wide Thermidor” of the early twenties (a phrase I realise I earlier mistakenly attributed to Adam Tooze!). When I first absorbed the term, I made the same error I described as often made about 1794-99: I read it as simply describing the retreat from the radical politics of the ‘red biennium’ (1919-20) in Europe into authoritarianism and fascism. Making this simplification, however, is a mistake.
The early twenties did see a remarkable conservative revival; but, as the title Maier gave his book suggests, renewal involved not simply a reversal, but a recasting of pre-war Bourgeois Europe. In a political and economic climate that had changed irrevocably since 1914, stabilisation necessitated adaptation. Before I go further, I must confess Thermidor is invoked by Maier only twice in his nearly six-hundred page tome. It is hardly a metaphorical cornerstone. But I believe it deserves more credit than this might imply. The elements of post-war conservatism in Germany, France and Italy that Maier stresses most are its reactivity and malleability; the fragility of its balance between interest groups; and the anti-democratic character it would increasingly take on. This is why the analogy with Thermidor is not just poetic, but apt: Maier’s picture is - even if he does not belabour the point - one of a global Thermidor.
But what did this actually look like? This is where Maier’s key conceptual tool comes in - corporatism. Simply expressed, corporatism is a form of economic organisation which seeks to mediate between labour and capital directly and in a structured manner; subverting both confrontational and democratically-led approaches. An inheritance of wartime planning, it would also present, for many, a solution to post-war industrial turmoil, especially in Germany. Hugo Stinnes, a prominent Ruhr industrialist, would produce a bold formulation of corporatist ‘socialisation’, largely as an attempt to deflect nationalisation pure and simple, in 1920. It involved co-operative planning, worker-ownership (in a limited form), and autonomy from state interference. Maier describes it as “a socialism cut for the entrepreneur!”; intended to transform the German coal and steel industry into a kind of gesamtcorporation. Stinnes’ plan would see implementation only in a heavily modified form; and even then, the ‘socialist’ components would become fatalities of the politics of hyperinflation in later years. But the advocacy of corporatism by industrialists like Stinnes matters in how it represents an epochal shift away from the assumption that "capital order" could be upheld without engagement with organised labour, as it had been before the war. The significance of this is hard to overstate: it is perhaps the defining difference between nineteenth and twentieth century capitalism. It has long outlived the interwar corporatism that nurtured it. But the road to this realisation was highly uneven.
Charting the differences between the French, German, and Italian routes to corporatist stabilisation is the central story of Maier’s book. As I hope I have made clear, Recasting Bourgeois Europe is unafraid to wield grand conceptual devices. But it is also a work of exceptional detail. In his treatment of ramified European electoral and industrial politics, Maier is simultaneously ambitious, precise, and subtle. His treatment of the Ruhr crisis (the supply-chain effects of the cleavage of Alsace; the balance-of-payments difficulties it exacerbated; how it both determined and was determined by French and German domestic politics; and the path to its eventual resolution) is the most convincing I have ever read. Still, the broad sweep is never left behind. The bidirectional linkage between domestic social issues and international political economy which led liberalism to frustration, industry to corporatism, and nationalists into power is emphasised throughout. If I may attempt a crude summary: while Germany was the first-mover towards corporatism, Italy went hardest and farthest in the direction of stabilisation. As Maier observes, “Mussolini [instituted] from above the same sort of corporatist organisation that the German revolution of 1918 had consummated”. Still, Maier admits they were not quite the same: while Italian corporatism “was designed to consolidate the power of a ruling group supposedly independent… of the marketplace”, Weimar corporatism “reflected [the] social power as well as parliamentary strength” of powerful socioeconomic actors. France, on the other hand, flirts with corporatism if never actually embracing it before 1929; a result reflected in its “still largely traditional social confrontations”. Why? Maier presents a thought-provoking (if perhaps dubious) explanation: that French industrial interests, for cultural reasons, saw themselves part of the Rentier class; committed to a high-valued franc against their interest, they were less willing to break with the bourgeois ancien regime for reasons of self-preservation than their Ruhr counterparts.
The only serious omission I found in Recasting Bourgeois Europe is the rather ghostly presence of the United States and Britain. This is maybe an inevitable byproduct of a bold (but necessarily limited) comparative history; where, by emphasising the entanglement of German, Italian, and French affairs, the role of international actors is simultaneously made even more apparent and even more difficult to incorporate cohesively. As a result, Maier’s financial story is sometimes a little disjointed: one can sense the presence and importance of British and American actors, but in an artificially peripheral way. This is least concerning regarding Italy (which is why, I think, Maier’s treatment of Italy is his most compelling). But it is quite striking when key Franco-German issues, such as those that circled around the 1924 Dawes plan, are at hand. I benefit from having previously read Tooze’s The Deluge; a book which, as he himself writes in a (recently republished) 2013 essay on Recasting Bourgeoisie Europe, was precisely motivated by “bringing Britain squarely into the frame”. Tooze also points at other deficiencies I have neglected to mention: the unevenness of Maier’s engagement with political violence and the ‘selection bias’ a focus on the few countries which experienced their Thermidor as inflationary - as against the many for which it was deflationary - might have incurred. Tooze is still filled with praise for Maier’s book, with an understandable - given the time - interest in the light Recasting Bourgeois Europe sheds on how Europe’s political class once faced a crisis in public finance and social stability. Having now read Maier myself, I can only really nod along.
Like the Thermidor of 1794, the Thermidor of 1924 was fragile. But it is true of both “that [while] the compromises were tenuous does not mean that they were doomed”. This sentiment resonates today: from industrial and climate policy to rapidly reshaping electoral politics, Maier’s key themes (tenuous compromise, the temptations of authoritarianism, and a crisis of liberalism) all appear together again. Nonetheless, pulling too much of Recasting Bourgeois Europe into the present is risky. Maier admits in many subsequent forewords that his focus on corporatism speaks as much to the conjuncture of when it was written - the seventies - as it does to the interwar years. Any conflation of the two is dangerous, for post-war corporatism was built on negotiating growth and expansion, not withstanding crises. Similarly, maybe we cannot have a Thermidor without a Frimaire: with no backdrop on the scale of the Reign of Terror or The Great War, there are limits to how far the historical analogy can be pushed. Those caveats aside, however, Maier has reframed how I think about ‘long crises’ irrevocably, and for the better. Stabilisation, reaction, retrenchment, re-education, and recasting: all words I will never read the same again.