A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon / For the Use of Schools and Colleges

by John Lord

CHAPTER XXX.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

If the American war was the greatest event in modern times, in view of ultimate results, the French Revolution may be considered the most exciting and interesting to the eye of contemporaries. The wars which grew out of the Revolution in France were conducted on a scale of much greater magnitude, and embroiled all the nations of Europe. A greater expenditure of energies took place than from any contest in the annals of civilized nations. Nor has any contest ever before developed so great military genius. Napoleon stands at the head of his profession, by general consent; and it is probable that his fame will increase, rather than diminish, with advancing generations.

It is impossible to describe, in a few pages, the great and varied events connected with the French Revolution, or even allude to all the prominent ones. The causes of this great movement are even more interesting than the developments.

The question is often asked, could Louis XVI. have prevented the catastrophe which overturned his throne? He might, perhaps, have delayed it; but it was an inevitable event, and would have happened, sooner or later. Causes of the French Revolution. There were evils in the government of France, and in the condition of the people, so overwhelming and melancholy, that they would have produced an outbreak. Had Richelieu never been minister; had the Fronde never taken place; had Louis XIV. and XV. never reigned; had there been no such women as disgraced the court of France in the eighteenth century; had there been no tyrannical kings, no oppressive nobles, no grievous taxes, no national embarrassments, no luxurious courts, no infidel writings, and no discontented people,—then Louis XVI. might have reigned at Versailles, as Louis XV. had done before him. But the accumulated grievances of two centuries called imperatively for redress, and nothing short of a revolution could have removed them.

Now, what were those evils and those circumstances which, of necessity, produced the most violent revolutionary storm in the annals of the world? The causes of the French revolution may be generalized under five heads: First, the influence of the writings of infidel philosophers; second, the diffusion of the ideas of popular rights; third, the burdens of the people, which made these abstract ideas of right a mockery; fourth, the absurd infatuation of the court and nobles; fifth, the derangement of the finances, which clogged the wheels of government, and led to the assembling of the States General. There were also other causes: but the above mentioned are the most prominent.

Of those Helvetius — Voltaire. philosophers whose writings contributed to produce this revolution, there were four who exerted a remarkable influence. These were Helvetius, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot.

Helvetius was a man of station and wealth, and published, in 1758, a book, in which he carried out the principles of Condillac and of other philosophers of the sensational, or, as it is sometimes called, the sensuous school. He boldly advocated a system of undisguised selfishness. He maintained that man owed his superiority over the lower animals to the superior organization of the body. Proceeding from this point, he asserted, further, that every faculty and emotion are derived from sensation; that all minds are originally equal; that pleasure is the only good, and self-interest the only ground of morality. The materialism of Helvetius was the mere revival of pagan Epicurianism; but it was popular, and his work, called De l'Esprit, made a great sensation. It was congenial with the taste of a court and a generation that tolerated Madame de Pompadour. But the Parliament of Paris condemned it, and pronounced it derogatory to human nature, inasmuch as it confined our faculties to animal sensibility, and destroyed the distinctions between virtue and vice.

His fame was eclipsed by the brilliant career of Voltaire, who exercised a greater influence on his age than any other man. He is the great apostle of French infidelity, and the great oracle of the superficial thinkers of his nation and age. He was born in 1694, and early appeared upon the stage. He was a favorite at Versailles, and a companion of Frederic the Great—as great an egotist as he, though his egotism was displayed in a different way. He was an aristocrat, made for courts, and not for the people, with whom he had no sympathy, although the tendency of his writings was democratic. In all his satirical sallies, he professed to respect authority. But he was never in earnest, was sceptical, insincere, and superficial. It would not be rendering him justice to deny that he had great genius. But his genius was to please, to amuse a vain-glorious people, to turn every thing into ridicule, to pull down, and substitute nothing instead. He was a modern Lucian, and his satirical mockery destroyed reverence for God and truth. He despised and defied the future, and the future has rendered a verdict which can never be reversed—that he was vain, selfish, shallow, and cold, without faith in any spiritual influence to change the world. But he had a keen perception of what was false, with all his superficial criticism, a perception of what is now called humbug; and it cannot be denied that, in a certain sense, he had a love of truth, but not of truth in its highest development, not of the positive, the affirmative, the real. Negation and denial suited him better, and suited the age in which he lived better; hence he was a "representative man," was an exponent of his age, and led the age. He hated the Jesuits, but chiefly because they advocated a blind authority; and he strove to crush Christianity, because its professors so often were a disgrace to it, while its best members were martyrs and victims. Voltaire did not, like Helvetius, propose any new system of philosophy, but strove to make all systems absurd. He set the ball of Atheism in motion, and others followed in a bolder track: pushed out, not his principles, for he had none, but his spirit, into the extreme of mockery and negation. And such a course unsettled the popular faith, both in religion and laws, and made men indifferent to the future, and to their moral obligations.

Quite a different man was Rousseau. Rousseau. He was not a mocker, or a leveller, or a satirist, or an atheist. He resembled Voltaire only in one respect—in egotism. He was not so learned as Voltaire, did not write so much, was not so highly honored or esteemed. But he had more genius, and exercised a greater influence on posterity. His influence was more subtle and more dangerous, for he led astray people of generous impulses and enthusiastic dispositions, with but little intelligence or experience. He abounded in extravagant admiration of unsophisticated nature, professed to love the simple and earnest, affected extraordinary friendship and sympathy, and was most enthusiastic in his rhapsodies of sentimental love. Voltaire had no cant, but Rousseau was full of it. Voltaire was the father of Danton, but Rousseau of Robespierre, that sentimental murderer who as a judge, was too conscientious to hang a criminal, but sufficiently unscrupulous to destroy a king. The absurdities of Rousseau can be detected in the ravings of the ultra Transcendentalists, in the extravagance of Fourierism, in the mock philanthropy of such apostles of light as Eugene Sue and Louis Blanc. The whole mental and physical constitution of Rousseau was diseased, and his actions were strangely inconsistent with his sentiments. He gave the kiss of friendship, and it proved the token of treachery; he expatiated on simplicity and earnestness in most bewitching language, but was a hypocrite, seducer, and liar. He was always breathing the raptures of affection, yet never succeeded in keeping a friend; he was always denouncing the selfishness and vanity of the world, and yet was miserable without its rewards and praises; no man was more dependent on society, yet no man ever professed to hold it in deeper contempt; no man ever had a prouder spirit, yet no man ever affected a more abject humility. He dilated, with apparent rapture, on disinterested love, and yet left his own children to cold neglect and poverty. He poisoned the weak and the susceptible by pouring out streams of passion in eloquent and exciting language, under the pretence of unburdening his own soul and revealing his own sorrows. He was always talking about philanthropy and generosity, and yet seldom bestowed a charity. No man was ever more eloquent in paradox, or sublime in absurdity. He spent his life in gilding what is corrupt, and glossing over what is impure. The great moral effect of his writings was to make men commit crimes under the name of patriotism, and permit them to indulge in selfish passion under the name of love.