THE ANCIEN RÉGIME AND THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.
Histoire de l'Ancien Régime, par Henri Taine. Paris.
Histoire de la Revolution française, par Henri Taine. Paris.
When De Tocqueville,in his celebrated work upon the Ancien Régime and the Revolution, had described the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy, he ended with these words:—"I have now reached the threshold of the great Revolution; on this occasion I shall not cross it, but perhaps I may soon be in a position to do so, and then I shall no longer consider its causes, but its nature, and shall finally venture to pass judgment on the society that has proceeded from it."
Death prevented this admirable inquirer from accomplishing his purpose, a loss to the historical literature of Europe for ever to be regretted, and certainly not least by the author who has now undertaken to fill up the blank, and complete De Tocqueville's projected task—the description, namely, of modern France as the outcome of the immense transformation which the Revolution brought upon the Old French State. The fundamental principles which appear so clearly and sharply in Tocqueville's development are prominent in Taine's; the activity of the earlier author prepared the ground for the later to build on. But we must admit that Taine's work is pre-eminently independent, and his descriptions more striking, broad, and richly coloured than those of his precursor, while the material contents of his work are often different. But what, in spite of this, constitutes the resemblance between the two men is, their having for basis a common conception both of the State and what it presupposes, and of the historian and his task. It is the very opposite of the manner of thinking entertained in the eighteenth century which, without any heed to the peculiar character of the necessities of a given people, was bent on constructing, according to simple rules of reason and natural law, the best State for all time. Taine, in a very striking manner, declares himself free from such an error. "In 1849," he observes, "I was an elector, and had to take part in the naming of a large number of Deputies. Therefore it was necessary not only to decide as to persons, but as to theories as well; I was required to be Royalist or Republican, Democrat or Conservative, Socialist or Bonapartist, and I was nothing of the kind—nay, I was nothing at all, and envied those who had the luck to be something. These worthy men built a constitution as they would a house, on the most ornamental, most new, or most simple plan; a row of models stood ready for choice, a baronial castle, a burgher's house, a workshop, a barrack, a phalanstery, a cottage, and each said of his favourite model: 'That is the only proper dwelling, the only one a rational man would inhabit.' To me this seemed an utter mistake. A people, as I thought, may indeed be able to say what house they admire, but some experience is needed to teach them what house they need, whether it be commodious and lasting, stands the weather well, and harmonizes with the customs, occupations, and fancy of its occupant. We here in France have never been content with our political erections; in the course of eighty years we have pulled them down and rebuilt them thirteen times. Other nations have acted differently, and found their advantage in so doing. They have preserved an old, substantial building, enlarged, built around, and beautified it according to their needs, but never attempted to build an ideal house at one stroke, according to the rules of pure reason. It would therefore appear that the sudden invention of an entirely new, and at the same time suitable and durable constitution is an undertaking that transcends human capacity. The political and social form which a people permanently assumes is no matter of choice, but fixed by its character and its past. It must be suited to its idiosyncrasy, even in the minutest points, or it will crack and fall. Therefore we must know ourselves before we can discover what the proper constitution for us is. We must invert the accustomed method, and first form to ourselves a picture of the nation before we sketch a constitution. At the same time this is a far harder and wider task than the one hitherto in favour. What inquiries into past and present, what labour in all domains of thought and action, are needed to understand with precision and completeness the nature and growth of a great people through centuries! But it is the only way to avoid putting out first empty discussions and then incoherent constructions; and, as regards myself, I shall not think of a political opinion until I have learnt to know France."
From this rejection of the rationalistic State theory, it follows, of course, that the author declines the style of historical writing that corresponds with it. We all know how parties who contended in the course of the Revolution have gone on attempting to justify their historical representation of it—Emigrants and Feuillans, Girondists and Montagnards, Bonapartists and Communists. They all knew exactly at the beginning of their historical labours what the conclusions arrived at would be. Their own party had the ideal of the only healthy State cut and dry, and hence the sentence upon companions, allies, and enemies was pronounced beforehand. The desirable aspects of the Revolution were owing to the activity of that party, the undesirable to the worthlessness of its adversaries. The study of isolated facts only awoke real interest in so far as it sharpened the perception of the main point—our party is right, all others are wrong. To this disposition of mind more than to any other hindrances we may attribute the small advance made, up to the middle of our century, in the knowledge of facts, in the history of the Revolution; this is what explains the else inexplicable phenomenon that, spite of the large interest felt in the period, no history of Louis XVI. drawn from authentic documents has as yet been written. For that even the books of De Tocqueville and Taine, spite of the strength of their authors' intellect and the wealth of their material, have not afforded us this, we shall soon convincingly see.
Both these works, however, are invaluable preparations for the writing of such a history. With firm and decided political principles of their own, both authors have determined to serve no party, but knowledge only. Both desire to know men and circumstances before they judge of the political experiments made. Both are full of the spirit of the old saying: "Human affairs are neither to be wept over nor laughed at, but to be understood." It is only when we know the soil and the seed from which the Revolution sprang that we can understand its nature and working, and only from the understanding of the whole can we pronounce upon the details with which factions have hitherto concerned themselves in endless and unprofitable debate. We will illustrate our meaning by a contrary procedure. I have not unfrequently heard the question: "How can Taine, whose first volume reveals more fully than any previous work the utter corruption of the Ancien Régime, place the Revolution in his second in an equally unfavourable light? If the old state were so completely good for nothing, the French were perfectly right in utterly destroying it." Accordingly, there has been no want of critics who, after the appearance of the first volume, declared the author to be a thorough Liberal, and, after the second, in deep disappointment, proclaimed him a thoroughly reactionary politician. There are, indeed, certain passages that might lead to such a conclusion, certain inconsistencies do appear, but on the whole it is self-evident, from an historical standpoint, that out of so evil a condition as the first volume paints the dark pictures of the second must needs grow. Rather should we have had cause to wonder if from a diseased root there had sprung a healthy tree. The men of the Revolution had grown up on no other soil and in no other atmosphere than that of the Ancien Régime; it was under it that their notions had arisen, their passions been fostered, and their ideal formed; it was there that their nature had received its stamp and their strivings their direction; and if all relations were dislocated, political feeling perverted, all portions of the people filled with bitter hatred against the State and each other, how should pupils in such a school amidst the final shock of catastrophes show themselves men of ripe experience, practical wisdom, and determined energy? He who has once taken in this simple truth will be much inclined to a mild judgment of individual men and parties; at all events, he will not be able abruptly to take sides either for or against the Ancien Régime or the Revolution. For one thing will have grown clear to him, that the Revolution was not the destroyer alone, but the undeniable offspring, of the old condition of things.
That a work of Henri Taine's displays literary ability of the first order there is no need to say. His representation of events is grounded on most industrious study; unpublished documents of all kinds are cited, as well as printed works, and among the latter we have not only French, but foreign authorities—English more especially—while German are hardly so much as noticed. At all events, the mass of thoroughly explored material is enormous, and our historical knowledge is frequently extended, rectified, and cleared thereby. We shall attempt to follow the general line of thought running through the book, and now and then to controvert it on certain points.
It will be remembered to what pregnant results Tocqueville's inquiries led. The centralized government of France is by no means a creation of our century, but a production of the Ancien Régime. Since the days of Richelieu, ministers of finance and their intendants and delegates had taken the exclusive charge of police of every kind, public works and plans, the economic and spiritual welfare of the people. The elementary principles of political liberty and parliamentary constitution, of independent local administration and commercial freedom, were destroyed thereby. Spiritual and temporal magnates had been almost sovereigns in the districts in which they fulfilled the duties of government, preserved internal and external peace, protected local interests, and consequently imposed taxes and corvées upon their dependents, while often successfully resisting royal aggression—all these magnates were now as unconditionally as the mass of the people subjected to the royal bureaucracy and forced out of all political activity—thenceforth, as hated parasites, they had to live at the cost of the working people. The King, therefore, assembled them at his Court, where, in compensation for their loss of liberty and honour, pensions and presents—always at the cost of the people—were heaped upon them. Thus the popular hatred went on intensifying with every generation, and was at length the source and essential element of the great Revolution.
It is on this thesis that Taine bases his representation of the subject. Privileges were once the reward of political service done by the heads and leaders of the people in their own territories. Then, the landlord lived in the midst of his dependents—his own interest was identical with their welfare, he was linked with them by natural and traditional ties, and appeared as their powerful advocate whenever the State attempted any arbitrary and oppressive measure. Now bureaucratic government divided the landowners from the people, and by the unjustified continuance of their privileges set the two henceforth in opposition. For because the nobleman paid no taxes, the burgher and farmer had to make up the deficit. Because he retained the right of chase, his game had to be fed on the crops of his tenants. If a not inconsiderable number of the higher middle classes gained the special privileges of nobility, the burthens of the rest of the people were only increased thereby. The author has rendered us praiseworthy service by exposing the extent of privileges and feudal rights on one hand, and of the increase of taxes and duties on the other, more fully and precisely than any other writer has done. Thorough investigation has brought out a still more appalling condition than had been imagined. After the State, the Church, and the landlord had received their rates, the share of the farmer in the proceeds of his land never amounted to more than a half, and often his taxes rose to eighty per cent. of his income. On the other hand, the privileged classes paid at least a fifth less than the just proportion, and knew how to obtain on a yearly average at least a hundred millions in the shape of presents, pensions, &c. With increasingly few exceptions, there was no more thought of any care to be taken of the lower classes by the higher. Prelates and magnates streamed towards Versailles; all that the peasants knew of them was from their unmerciful agents coming for rent and taxes. Thus France fell asunder into two worlds without, unfortunately, any reciprocal knowledge or common interest, divided by contempt and hatred—worlds that lived on side by side, the smaller in wealth, enjoyment, elegance, and luxury, and, above all, brilliant idleness; the larger in poverty, wretchedness, ignorance, savagery, and, above all, in ever-growing and devouring bitterness of heart—a condition such as no other nation of Christian Europe had ever before come to.
Now all this is perfectly correct, and Taine proves it by a mass of authentic testimony: nevertheless it may be observed that it is only a part of the truth, and by this one-sidedness the author has been led into error.
I am now alluding to the first part of this exposition, that which treats of the centralization of the government in the hands of royal officials as the deepest root of all this mischief. The worst side of this centralization had been incontrovertibly exposed by De Tocqueville, but none the less his representation was unfair and unjust, because it made no mention of the brighter side. No one can contest that the political inactivity of men of all positions in a system that referred the general interests of France to a bureaucracy, demoralized the higher classes and left the lower ignorant and inexperienced. Still the historian should not forget the actual achievements of this great bureaucracy. Under Colbert's guidance it created the civic order and economical beginnings of modern France. It, for the first time in France, rendered throughout a century a burghers' war an impossible thing, and it stimulated internal traffic by roads and canals, which gave rise to countless industrial and commercial undertakings. Later, under Turgot and Necker, it waged, on behalf of the people, war against the pressure of privileges, thought primarily of reform and progress, and saw with bitter regret the defeat of its popular efforts by the opposition of the nobles. Tocqueville himself tells how the Liberal parties before the Revolution thought more of reforms than liberties—that is to say, they expected the improvement of their condition from a further strengthening of the Monarchy. It came to a Revolution first, however. The Monarchy, wielded by the feeble hand of Louis XVI., was unequal to the task; then privileges fell for ever, but after ten years monarchical centralization arose anew in order a second time to satisfy the needs and inclinations of the French people throughout three generations. It seems therefore a mistake to paint this institution so out and out black. We may lament that it has not merely done nothing to educate the French in political liberty, but has as much as possible stifled liberty and the very sense of it among them. But how without it, under the circumstances that succeeded to the religious wars and the Fronde, anything like a positive constitution ever could have arisen in France, De Tocqueville does not say. We are indeed amazed when Taine, in his enumeration of the privileged classes as those luxurious idlers, those once political servants who had now renounced all political influence, numbers, as third with the clergy and nobility, the King—the head of that Government, which was only too zealous in working, and thereby drew all the power of the State to itself and excluded all others from care for the common weal. Here there is an evident contradiction, nor is it any way cleared up by the circumstance that personally Louis XV. vied in indolence and debauchery with the worst of his courtiers, or that his unfortunate successor spent much of his time and energy in Court etiquette and the chase. For the reign of Louis XVI. was from first to last spent in efforts, by the setting aside of feudal privileges, alike to strengthen the Crown and promote the good of the people, and in no case can it be more incorrect to look upon the Crown as a devouring parasitical growth upon the body of the State. This brings me back to my former remark: had Taine instead of or by the side of his picture of society under the Ancien Régime written the history of its last monarch, most assuredly he would have avoided this misconception.
But he admirably describes how the brilliant and empty position of the higher class led step by step to ruin. These distinguished personages had no earnest and strenuous activity; to be civil officials appeared to the majority of them below their dignity. They adopted the army as a mere sphere of chivalrous adventure, for even there, there was no question for them of rigid discipline; they left the drilling and care of their troops to subalterns and sergeants. Bishops and abbots drew immense revenues, and gallantly offered their devotion to fair dames, but as to divine services and cure of souls, they were the affair of needy priests and hungry vicars. The only field for their ambition and interest was the Court, the salon, good society. To shine there was the object of their distinguished lives. And as the French people have ever been largely endowed with grace and esprit, these efforts resulted in a perfection of personal appearance, a virtuoso-ship of social intercourse, a fixed and yet highly elastic code of bon ton, such as the world never saw before or since. Until then the first class of a great nation had never been known to make the formation of an exquisite society its highest, nay, its only life-purpose, to subordinate and sacrifice mental activity, moral strength, and individuality of character to the promotion and claims of this cultus. Here the final end of existence was enjoyment in all imaginable degrees, and thought and action were rigidly directed to it. That the greatest part of life should be spent in society was the most pressing requirement of politeness, the reciprocal recognition without which all society becomes unendurable. The conventional forms in which this recognition clothed itself became the law of this great world, and the consequences were felt on all sides. Any appearance of individual peculiarity or opinion came to be held unfitting; to be other or better than the rest was an offence against manners. Equally forbidden was the manifestation of any strong passion, a thing by its very nature opposed to the sway of conventionality. Vice therefore was excused if it presented itself gracefully, and almost honoured if it brought a startling and exciting variety into the monotony of daily life. Mental enjoyments were as welcome as sensual, provided they could be had without trouble or labour, for the aim was not to be informed, but amused, and so any kind of knowledge was good, with the exception of the tedious. Hence it followed that all mental acquirement was estimated not by the worth of its content but the excellence of its form: abstract intelligence in the service of enjoyment, such was the motto of this society. Genial originality, unconscious creative power, native vigour, were thoroughly antipathetic there, or only tolerated in so far as they made themselves subservient to the ruling mood.
A further consideration of how essentially these characteristics of good society tended to strengthen and sharpen the revolutionary theories of its deadly foes, here becomes instructive. The development of this process may indeed be looked upon as the salient point in Taine's work, for often as the French literature and philosophy of the eighteenth century have been treated of, I know of no earlier author who with such extensive material and penetrating insight has clearly brought out the continuous reciprocal action of circumstances and theories, and thus gained an unalterable scale for the measurement of both by history. Taine begins, as is just, with the mighty impetus given to natural science since the middle of the seventeenth century throughout Europe, by which a way was opened for an utterly new view of the world and of men, in opposition to the speculative and theological conceptions of the Middle Ages.
Next comes under consideration the prevalence of the inductive method, the rejection of all dogmatic assumption, the repugnance to all intuitive ideas, the proclamation of observation and experiment as the only sources of verifiable knowledge. These principles having been at once unconditionally acknowledged in the sphere of natural science, the next step was to apply the tone of thought they had engendered to the phenomena of spiritual and social life, and here also to demand thorough investigation by the one true authority—criticism. Whatever the consequence of this investigation might in particular cases be, the very fact that it had been demanded, that the right of the existing, as such, was denied, that the authority of tradition was subjected to that of critical reason—this betokened a new epoch in the world's history, and opened out possibilities of hitherto undreamed-of progress in politics and religion, State and Church, material and spiritual culture. It is now plain that if the inductive method can lead to such positive results, its application should be thorough and universal. No naturalist delivers a general law as to the life of an organism before he has considered its origin, existence, and decay in all their stages, compared it with its like, separated it from its unlike; for it is just through the discovery and recognition of the eminently special that analysis leads him to the comprehension of universal truth. And according to this same rule, in order to arrive at a just and practicable idea of reform for any State, a great mass of special observations by technically practised and prepared eyes would have been required; legal, economical, and historical inquiries made; the peculiarities of individuals and peoples, of the epoch and stage of culture, must have been known; the not merely personal but collective functions of human nature in their bases and action investigated: for only when all this had been accomplished could it be asserted that the organism of the State and its laws had been dealt with after the manner of a genuine naturalist, and that we were now in a condition to judge of single actualities according to these laws.
How came it that in the France of the eighteenth century the very opposite occurred—that politicians, stimulated by young natural science, should from the very first turn their backs upon the inductive method, and evolve the future State rationalistically, according to a few abstract principles?
Taine convincingly shows the reason of this: it was chiefly the influence of fashionable society upon literature which led to this fatal tendency.
The highest circles in Paris and Versailles, in their brilliant but idle existence, were, as we have seen, as intent upon mental as sensual excitement, and therefore prepared to open their doors to every littérateur who could satisfy this demand. Now, owing to the actual structure of society in France, the writer who did not choose merely to devote himself to a few professional subjects had no other public than this distinguished class. They and they alone were in a position to secure him praise, honours, and a certain income, therefore it was most natural that the writer should conform to requirements upon the satisfaction of which his literary career was so absolutely dependent. We have now to inquire what were the characteristics of the prevalent tone of thought among the highest class. First a horror of all thoroughness, all enduring and laborious perseverance, all deep earnestness and spiritual recollection. For all this was the very opposite of enjoyment and diversion, it was a falling into the deadly sin of tediousness. It was desirable, indeed, to have much and varied knowledge, but rapidly and lightly, by vivid and pungent discussion, to reach the quintessence of the most interesting points and conclusions. Consequently the author's productions became restless, many-sided, and superficial. The mass of information in every department of knowledge which Voltaire, for instance, had at his disposal was immense; but the working out and application of it were strongly hasty, aphoristic, and frivolous. To this was added the dislike the public of the time had to any individual peculiarity, its tendency to force all personalities into one conventional form—an effort equally fatal to poetic creation and to the historical sense. For such men as these the world was comprehended in what they called the great world; they had lost the power of imagining that there was or ever had been an existence outside of it and absolutely unlike it; or if in any particular case the astounding fact could not be entirely concealed, it was understood that among cultivated persons it could never be given any importance. Even on the stage it was no longer considered becoming that peasants or labourers, a Peruvian or Iroquois, should speak in their own natural manner; they were all alike rendered polite, sententious, and fluent as their distinguished audience. Each local and individual tone was rubbed away, every person of the drama was but a mouthpiece for the eighteenth-century eloquence of the author. As with the drama, so with other literature. Taine correctly observes that if we read an English romance of the period, we have before our eyes a section of the English people; but a French one, though widely varying in garb, contains invariably a picture of a French salon, and that only. In presence of so universal a mood as this, how could any one come to the study of the State by means of difficult and distant researches on historical ground? Montesquieu did it, but he remained solitary among his contemporaries, won much celebrity, but exercised very little influence. The other reformers used quickly to turn over the pages of histories in order to find piquant quotations for some ready-made theory; as, for instance, the ambition of priests, the falsehood of diplomatists, the insatiability of princely greed. As to the complicated task of judging any individual State and its constitution according to its climatic and geographic conditions and its historical antecedents, with the exception of Montesquieu, no man dreamt of that. The public, with whom the decision lay, did not require anything of the kind, nay, would have repaid the severe toil with disapproval. It placed, as we have before said, far more stress on a pleasant form than an instructive purpose, cared but little for any subject in itself, but only as affording material for the most intelligent, yet at the same time most comprehensible and exciting conversation. In debate no trace of previous knowledge won by personal effort was pre-supposed; all that was needed was never to be commonplace, and in every case to bring forward new and amazing truths. Accordingly speech and style strove neither for fulness nor depth, but so much the more for clearness and conclusiveness. In exposition, the progress was regular from syllogism to syllogism, great care being taken never to skip over a middle term. In order to be impressive the speaker became rhetorical, in order to convince he endeavoured to reduce every subject to one universal and easily inculcated proposition. Good society was delighted to be thus agreeably put in possession of the most advanced views of the world; but literature thus allowed itself to deviate from real knowledge into the way of empty abstraction.
That the literature thus fostered and guided should from the beginning of the eighteenth century have been in opposition, that since the middle of it it should have undermined with savage impetuosity all the foundations of existing conditions, this gave not the least shock to distinguished society. Disgust at their own impotence and the omnipotence of royal officials, dislike to an intolerant orthodoxy, vexation at some personal neglect at Court,—altogether there was cause enough for malicious satisfaction when philosophers, by biting criticisms, made clear the standpoint of burdensome potentates. And when an ever-growing and strengthening Materialism taught the doctrine of physical enjoyment and judicious selfishness as the guiding principle of human conduct, it only spoke out what had half-unconsciously been the sum of all the motives and activities of high society. But above all, theories were but theories, merely conversation, excitement, pastime. The nobles declaimed against obsolete abuses, but naturally each meant to keep his own rightful possessions, and among these were privileges and feudal rights. They felt conscious of a fresh superiority to the ignorant masses, because they professed humanitarianism and liberalism, and spoke against superstition and subordination. That these much-admired theories might by-and-by become common to the whole community, and then bring about horrible explosions—of this they had not the remotest suspicion. Any one who had in 1780 prophesied such a thing to the ladies of Versailles, would have been looked upon as we should look upon a prophet nowadays, who told us that in the next century cats and dogs, instead of men, were to be lords of creation.
This, then, was the public in whose atmosphere and with whose co-operation the philosophy of revolutionary enlightenment sprung up. It was here that it learned its rapid and superficial mode of study, its rejection of an historical spirit in favour of multitudinous present actualities, its taste for rhetorically adorned formulæ and commonplaces. When the construction of the best State was to be set about, common characteristics were collected from the natural history of mankind, such as the dislike to pain, the impulse towards pleasure, the capacity of forming, from sensations, representations and conclusions. These characteristics were merely put together as the concept man, and from this abstract man were deduced, as in a mathematical formula, the laws of politics, morals, and rights. Since all men had the same natural impulse towards happiness, the State must render it possible for them all to reach that aim. Since all had a natural capacity to form concepts and conclusions, they would be sure to employ the right means to that end so soon as their hands were left free, or in case of a momentary mistake these right means logically pointed out to them. That passion is, in point of fact, in the great majority of men, stronger than reason, and desire more impetuous than thought, was disregarded by these admirers of abstract reason; the fact that each man had the faculty of drawing a logical conclusion appeared to them to insure his conforming his conduct to the requirements of that conclusion. If a logically formulated proof of the excellence of one of the Constitutions they had sketched could be arrived at, they fancied that the security and durability of its construction was perfectly guaranteed. On the other hand, that the preservation of constitutional order required other forces besides logical discussions, this was altogether outside their range of thought.
But logic knows no limits beyond the evolution of its own conceptions. The existing condition of things lent itself to being ground to powder. Before the critical assault of the new teaching no defence of the hoary unrighteousness of the Old Régime could make a stand; the pity was that, according to its own principles, the former found it impossible to attain to a firm and enduring constitution of any sort or colour.
But, if possible, the theories afloat set in against the existing ecclesiastical system even more strongly than against the political constitution. The natural science of the day afforded far more material for battle on that ground than the other. Astronomy, physiology, and anthropology joined with the efforts of philosophy to demonstrate that miracle was a delusion, revelation unthinkable, and an extra-mundane God unverifiable. Soon numerous voices exalted negation into the positive statement that every idea of God should be rejected, and that the so-called soul in man was only the highest function of organized matter. True, Voltaire remained through life a Deist, and Rousseau declared his faith in God and in the immortality of the soul; but the one all the more resolutely contended against the divine institution of the Church, and the other against the fundamental Christian doctrines of Sin and Justification. However different each may have been from the other, they waged in common a war for life and death against the Church, the war of utterly opposed principles. Tocqueville was wrong in saying that the Revolution was only inimical to the Church as a feudal and aristocratic institution; that after it had lost its wealth and privileges, democratic society recognized how strong a democratic momentum the Church itself contained, and accordingly gave itself up with increased warmth to religious feelings. Here there is no doubt Taine's record is the more correct one. The Revolution knew well that it desired not the wealth only, but the fall of the Church; and not the partisans of the Revolution, but its adversaries, whose numbers were largely swelled by the cruelties of the Terror, have brought about the elevation of the Church in our own century.
If we now contemplate somewhat more narrowly the Constitutional theory of the illumination, we shall discern two characteristic and prominent features, which, on the one hand, show its descent from the innermost core of the Ancien Régime, and, on the other, very energetically determined the whole course of the Revolution. The ideal state deduced from the universal characteristics of mankind was as cosmopolitan as levelling. Just as on the stage of the period, Frenchman and savage, ancient Greek and modern Parisian, spoke the same language,—that of the salons of Versailles,—so political theories recognized neither Frenchman nor Englishman, Catholic nor Protestant, educated nor uneducated, only Man in general. They never considered what institutions would be adequate, in France, to the needs and capacities of the educated ranks and uneducated masses, or how far the habits and opinions of their nation would render the adoption of a foreign institution practicable or injurious; rather they formulated the rights of men, of abstract instead of actually existing men, and were convinced that a constitution based thereupon was for all men, and consequently for all peoples, the only good, and therefore the only lawful one. And just as clear as the equality of nations under the new political law, appeared the equality of all men in the new State, by which was meant not merely a claim to equal protection by law, or equal facility in obtaining one's rights, but a demand for the realization of an inborn and material equality of rights. This, as is well known, was the point on which Rousseau took his stand, and gave the last and decisive direction to the impending democratic revolution. Taine justly observes how frequently, in spite of their common principles, Rousseau's character and way of life led him to take different views from those of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists. The deepest and most unqualified indignation of these last was inspired by what they called superstition, stupidity, and priestcraft, the transformation of the old State being with them more an affair of the intellect than the feelings, a conclusion drawn from their universal theory and an ideal requirement of philanthropy. It was generosity that led them to appear as the advocates of the poor and their woes, while they themselves were high in the approval and favour of the best society. Rousseau, on the other hand, had himself led the life of the proletaire; in the nervous excitability and measureless vanity which made him almost prouder of his weaknesses and vices than of the greatness and strength of his talents he—poor, often hungry, not seldom degraded and reviled—had filled himself with burning wrath against the favoured of earthly fortune, the noble and the rich, the revellers in idleness and luxury. This growing hatred he transferred to the State and the laws which had produced so unrighteous a contrast between man and man. Men, he maintained, were in their original condition good, because equal. It was the State, culture, society, that first introduced inequality, and vice and crime thereby. The existing order was not merely incompetent, as the Encyclopædists asserted, but hurtful, poisonous, deadly. And, in contrast to it, he sketches a picture of the true human State.
Equal and good men assemble in their natural condition to think on the basis of their future State. Each endows the new community with all liberty and property, in order to receive back an equal share of the management and the possessions of the whole. But this whole is omnipotent. No laws bind its will, for its will is the source of all law. No king, no official, no superior rules over it; each individual is only empowered to act, so far and so long as he upholds the plenipotence of the sovereign mass. It is not the upper classes who command the people, but the people which require obedience from its officers and throws them away when they no longer please it. For individual liberty there is here no place; but owing to the equality of all, the free will of the masses joyously and harmoniously prevails.
For a season these doctrines only served to afford a welcome mental stimulant to the minds, if not of the nobility, of the cultivated and property-possessing classes. The higher, and soon the lower, bourgeoisie inflated themselves with these views. At this period they shared certain of the privileges of the nobles, filled numerous and prominent offices in the State, gave to the nation its largest number of famous thinkers and poets, promoted industry and commerce, and daily increased in wealth, while the nobles, by their extravagance, ruined themselves financially. The former were, therefore, full of the consciousness of their own dignity, and found the continued precedence claimed by the nobles to be unendurable. They believed with inward satisfaction in this doctrine of the equality of all men and the sovereignty of the whole. For, instead of the privileged, it seemed to them self-evident that owing to their culture they, the hitherto unprivileged, ought to stand out prominently among the people as leaders of that governing whole. Thus the state of freedom and equality would be the state of pure reason as well, and, therefore, the leading position could not fail to fall to them, the masters of reasonable discussion. Meanwhile the mass of the poor, wholly cut off from the sources of culture and the mental movements of their country, for long years knew nothing of this absolute governing power which, according to the new discoveries, inalienably belonged to it, and was so surprisingly soon to fall into its lap. The only change in their condition, and thus the only preparation for their future sovereignty, was an increase of outward distress and of inward confusion and embitterment; and then came the time when the small circle to which education and enjoyment were limited, and the State power they wielded, fell into internal demoralization, strife of factions, and financial embarrassments, till the very Crown itself was obliged to summon popular forces to war against the privileged. All the springs of State machinery refused to work, coffers were empty, authorities and classes at bitter internecine strife, the army unreliable and undisciplined. It was under circumstances like these that the mass of the people in towns and villages heard from their candidates, advocates, and demagogues, what in truth their rights were. In their ignorance and want, their rudeness and embitterment, they suddenly learnt that for them—as sovereign—limits, obligations, authority no longer existed, that the old corruption and slavish condition was to be thoroughly got rid of, and that then everything would belong to them. They listened with greedy ears, and rushed forward to trample under foot whatever sought to contest these rights of theirs.
The highest and noblest aims lured the century on, and animated the hearts of countless worthy men: liberty, well-being, and culture for all, no difference between man and man but that of talent and virtue, fraternity among all citizens in the State and all nations on the earth; these were the ideals that 1780 proclaimed to the world and the future, and therefore the French still love to speak of the deathless principles and fair days of this first epoch of the Revolution. All this, Thiers tells us, would have been admirably realized had not evil-hearted emigrants and foreign Powers by their malignant attacks, driven the most humane of all Revolutions into desperation, a fight for existence, and bloodshed. All would have gone well, says Louis Blanc, had not the wicked Thermidorians, on the occasion of Robespierre's fall, brought in a policy of vice and self-seeking instead of one of virtue and brotherly love. Probably, on the other side the Vosges, eighty men out of every hundred adopt one or other of these views, and so it is easily intelligible that the merciless facts by which Taine shatters these fair pictures should be received with repugnance and surprise by his countrymen. The contrast between such a reality and such an ideal is indeed enormous; fair days, or so much even as one fair day in the course of the Revolution, can no longer be spoken of; in the very hour when absolute monarchy collapsed, a wild, rude, and cruel anarchy covered the land, filling France with violence and crime of every kind for a decade, and lastly causing an unparalleled despotism to appear to the French people salvation and deliverance. The conclusion is unavoidable, either the ideal was good for nothing, and the Coblentz emigrants had right on their side against the nation, or the French people had set about their high task in a quite impracticable way, and their historical fame has this time to be limited to the motto, In magnis voluisse sat est. Neither of these alternatives will have a pleasing sound in the ears of a Liberal Frenchman.
But, pleasing or not, the facts are indisputable, and up to the present time each new investigation of authentic documents has only served to give them a wider range and a more assured basis. We have seen the end of the Ancien Régime. The nobles of the former State were unnerved by idleness, debilitated by enjoyment, degraded by immorality; never had the aristocracy of a great nation fallen and been brushed away from the soil of their country, making so feeble a resistance. The leaders of the movement followed a political teaching based on a most one-sided and therefore radically false conception of human nature, and had no idea of the real nature of their fellow-citizens, or of the principles and needs of genuine political life. Finally the masses were unmoved by any political thought whatever, but were darkly conscious of their own wretched state up to the present time, and their hatred of those who had, or were supposed to have, occasioned it, were credulous and impressionable, and penetrated with the rightfulness of their wildest passions and desires. With such materials as these it is possible indeed to blow up an old and half-useless house, but not to construct on its ruins a well-planned and lasting new one.
Thus Taine shows by details from documents contemporaneous with the events, how, even before the opening of the National Assembly, the condition of things was out of joint at a hundred points. Tumults and plunder, disobedience to authorities, and maltreatment of obnoxious persons, were the order of the day; public officials were spiritless, and dared not command the already murmuring troops to restore order. The first weeks of the Assembly brought hot discussions as to the union of the three orders, attempts at reactionary State measures, and the taking of the Bastille. Excitement grew from day to day; the suspense throughout the country was tremendous. With the Parisian catastrophes the whole Ancien Régime rocked and gave way from side to side; and not merely privileges and feudal rights, but all State authorities vanished at one blow, or at the first threat from an armed mob resigned their functions. The French nation had positively no government, no laws, no police, no taxation. In place of these they had journals, clubs, societies, popular songs, and Lynch law; security for person and property no longer existed; every one did according to his heart's desire till a stronger than he preferred the opposite and knocked him down. This state of anarchy actually went on thus till the culmination of the Reign of Terror; every now and then it quieted down here or there, to burst out the following day at some other point with redoubled fury. In the midst of the omnipresent turmoil and confusion, the King, a powerless prisoner, sat in the Tuileries. The only quarter which afforded a possibility of the restoration of the State was the National Assembly, which was sufficiently respected and popular both with the people and the National Guard, to have enforced obedience had it set about it the right way. But there were two reasons which forbade the adoption of that way. One was that the Assembly was deprived of free action by the ruling theory of the Rights of Man, Liberty and Equality. This included the rights of resistance against oppression, and accordingly every citizen might at any moment consider himself oppressed and authorized in resisting. It had been borne in upon these sovereign citizens that the will of the sovereign people stood higher than that of its representatives, and that the people was at any time capable of re-entering upon the direct exercise of its sovereignty. It is plain that under the influence of theories such as these any control over street-riots and local deeds of violence was a difficult, if not hopeless task. And, on the same ground, it was impracticable to attempt any control or regulation of press or clubs, which looked upon their boundless activity as the highest expression and most precious jewel of revolutionary liberty. As, according to theory, State officials were to be, not the lords, but the servants of the sovereign people, it became expedient that they should not be named by the Central Government, but chosen, and that only for a short time, by the citizens. In the same spirit the affairs of Government were entrusted not to individual officials, but to deliberating colleagues; while, as to the passing of laws, the principle of equality rendered impossible the formation of an Upper House, or any finally decisive action on the part of the King. Thus the Government remained powerless, legislation was hasty and uncertain, the lower classes unmanageable, and on very many occasions it was plain that club orators and journalists who knew how to flatter the demands of the masses bent both Government and National Assembly beneath their sway. More than once there arose indignation in the Assembly at so unworthy and dangerous a condition; but at each attempt to grapple with and remove it, the fear of a monarchical or aristocratic reaction fell upon it and paralyzed its action.
In order to control the anarchical wilfulness of demagogues and proletaires there was but one thing to be done, to strengthen the authority of the executive. This meant restoration of discipline in the army, and energetic organization of Government, extensive powers conferred on the police officials, sharp punishments, and swift justice. But how then? If power were thus conferred upon the Government to restrain proletaires and rioters, who could guarantee liberty and the National Assembly against the head of the reinforced Government, against the King, who had hitherto been by these chronic riots kept in defenceless subjection? This dilemma led to the revolutionary spirit invariably triumphing at the National Assembly. The present fear of the violence of the crowd attendant at the sittings combined with the apprehension of a future monarchical reaction. When, some years later, at the organization of the Republican Government, the weakness of authority was again felt, more than one orator freely declared the existing arrangements to be undoubtedly bad throughout, and to be amended as soon as possible; owned that this had, indeed, been perfectly known at the time of their creation in 1790, but that they were intentionally framed thus, in the interests of liberty, to prevent the King from exercising any power. Enough—the Constitutional Assembly did nothing to surround personal safety and political order with any inviolable defence; on the contrary, they did much to open the door wide to the passionate and arbitrary action of the masses. We may say that they thoughtlessly sowed the seeds of all the horrors of the Terror, and had the sad beginnings of that development before their eyes, without even an attempt to avert them. This is true, most especially in the economical department: the colossal transformation of the laws of property in France, which brought half the soil into new hands, and irresistibly threw the population at large into communistic paths, was out and out the work of the Constituent Assembly.
For more than twenty years I have, in my "History of the Revolution Period," established these circumstances from authentic documents, and thus given repeated offence to the French public. I may therefore be permitted to feel all the greater satisfaction at such a distinguished investigator as Taine, after drawing forth numberless documents from Parisian archives, coming to absolutely the same conclusion. All I have heard in the way of objection to his statements is utterly unimportant. As it is not possible to drive the facts he has proved from original documents out of existence, the observation is made that though his information may be true, it is one-sided; that while he never wearies of describing revolts and misdeeds, he does not sufficiently point out in how many places the Civil Guard bravely and loyally upheld civil order. Taine would be the last to dispute this fact; had it not been so there would have been no longer any France left in the nineteenth century. But he would venture to inquire whether praise be deserved by an Assembly which, as ruler of a great State, surrendered without resistance now the third of it, now the half, during three years, to a bloody anarchy; whether we can speak of "fair days" or "humane Revolution," when in this short period six horrible Jacqueries laid the land waste, when countless political murders remained unpunished, and military émeutes and ecclesiastical brawls thrust the weapons of civil war into the hands of the masses. We are told of a pure and ideal inspiration then filling millions of liberty-loving and patriotic spirits; and well may we call that a fair time in which noble aims and infinite hopes set all pulses beating higher, and stimulate a whole people to youthful efforts, and fill it with fresh and energetic life. Yes, there were moments of golden dreams and illusions like these. Only they should have lasted longer. It is not through their feelings, speeches, wishes, but their deeds, that nations assume their historical position and receive their historical sentence. Taine writes the last, indeed, with an incisive pen, and often with glaring colours, but essentially he gives nothing but what follows by indissoluble sequence from the facts of the Revolution.
On certain points, indeed, one may notice a few omissions in his work, or raise a few objections, though they do not affect it as a whole. Space does not permit me to dwell on all particular instances; I must be satisfied with pointing out a few. While during the first months of the Revolution the agitation of the lower classes was identical in town and country, and the lawless violence of artisans and peasants pursued the same ends by the same means, one of the most prominent features of the later phase, the Terror, was the gradual introduction of a war of interest between the people of the capital and the villages. The more the power of the Mountain and the Parisian Commune increased, the more absolutely the booty of the Revolution fell to the share of the town proletaires, at the cost not only of the great landed proprietors, but the small farmers as well. Our first impression at the aspect of this rivalry is the selfishness and greed of the Parisian demagogues; but we may easily convince ourselves that these could never have attained to so extended an activity if existing circumstances had not offered the possibility of a class war. But for any disquisition on this subject, or allusion to the causes that, in the first years of the Revolution, prepared its way, we look through Taine's pages in vain. Again, in the representation of the Ancien Régime, his attention is pre-eminently turned to social relations connected with the land. Had he with an equally comprehensive and minute care studied the different strata, the interests and wants of the town population, the problem alluded to would have solved itself.
It is with admirable insight and incontrovertible reasoning that Taine shows the logical untenableness and practical mischief of the theory of equality, both in the writings of Rousseau and the action of the Constituent Assembly. He proves the contradiction between this equality and the very nature of man, and how, consequently, pure democracy rendered the development of political liberty unattainable. In perfect agreement with Tocqueville, he points to the absolute necessity, under the circumstances of the time, of aristocratic institutions, for the creation and preservation of a free State, and explains how deeply seated these are in the needs and claims of human nature. This portion of his work is indeed masterly; and the more widely extended the equalitarian superstition among the Liberal parties of our day, the more one could desire Taine's views to exercise a strong and wide-spread influence. But, on the other hand, it appears to me that by this very conception of political institutions, our author has been led to show himself something more than just in the sentence he passes on the representatives of this period, the nobles and prelates of 1789. This is one of the few incongruities already alluded to between the first and second volume. After reading of the luxury, artificiality, and idleness of aristocratic society in the former, and coming with the author to the conviction that terrible consequences must attend such a condition, one is surprised to find in the latter that these privileged ones were the best, the most discerning and patriotic portion of the nation, whose annihilation or exile brought about the same injurious results that the expulsion of the Huguenots had done. This contradiction is not cleared up by the fact that in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, and chiefly through the influence of Rousseau, a sentimental humanity had prevailed in high circles, that here, too, it was the fashion to speak of a return to an idyllic life of nature, of universal brotherly love, and of the relief of every form of distress. For these transformations remained, in point of fact, only fanciful phrases of the salons. When Louis XVI., Turgot, and Calonne, really desired to set about such philanthropic reforms in good earnest, it was, as we have already seen, these sentimental nobles themselves who hindered their effort, and by nullifying reform brought about the Revolution. When the catastrophe came, many of them had sufficient insight into the new position of affairs to make haste and repudiate those privileges which throughout the land had been already trampled under foot by an unchained people. The horrible persecution to which they were subjected, in utter disregard of all existing rights and all human feeling, with bloodthirsty cruelty and shameless greed, must ever insure for the victims the compassion and sympathy of every right-minded observer; and in order fully to justify revolutionary laws against emigrants, one would be driven to advance sophisms only, not arguments. But all this does not affect the question, whether, as Taine assumes, these persecuted ones did hold a distinguished place in the nation for political virtue, intellectual culture, and capacity for action. Neighbouring nations, so far as I know, without exception took at the time an entirely different view. Doubtless, there were among the emigrants many who won respect and regard in the regions whither their flight had led them. But the great majority, by their thoughtless arrogance, mutual bickerings, and shameless frivolity, left behind them a bad reputation; whereas a hundred years before the exiled Huguenots, by their unity, earnestness, and industry, won, wherever they went, the respect and gratitude of their new countrymen.
Heinrich von Sybel.