The French Revolution

by Sir Charles Edward Mallet

Posterity is more familiar with the defects than with the virtues of this strange episode in human thought. Its ideals were disfigured by many faults—by unreality, political ignorance, dangerous license, violent extremes. In its anxiety to escape from conventions, it relaxed necessary codes. It made impiety obstreperous. It hastily adopted a belief in the perfectibility of man, to fill the niche where once had rested a belief in the perfection of God. In place of the traditions and systems which it uprooted, it taught its followers to look for guidance to their own instincts, and to vague aspirations after imaginary systems of natural law. It planted in the French people an inextinguishable desire to abolish everything which reminded it of the past, however much they might suffer in the attempt. Its teaching seemed to discourage the impulses of virtue, and to offer no satisfaction for the spiritual needs of man. Helvetius' famous treatise De l'Esprit laid down, amid much shallow commonplace, the depressing doctrine that self-interest dictates both the conduct and the views of men, and that the attainment of pleasure is their only final aim. Holbach's not less famous Système de la Nature touched the climax of a century of philosophical commotion, in its passionate indictment of the vices of kings and the slavery of men, in its direct demand for revolution, in its remorseless rejection of every form of faith, in its insistence upon atheism and materialism as the only true philosophy of life. 'Religious and political errors,' cried Holbach, 'have changed the universe into a valley of tears.'

Beside the contributors to the Encyclopaedia, and sometimes among them, were men of different schools of thought, allied with them in advocating change. Quesnai and Turgot were conspicuous in the ranks of an eminent sect termed by some Economists, by others Physiocrats. The Economists shared with Diderot and his colleagues the zeal for reform, the contempt for the past, the democratic temper of the times. They were prepared to enforce equality even at the cost of despotism. They insisted on the subordination of all private rights to the public interest. They preached the necessity of national education as the first essential of national prosperity, and urged that the burden of taxation should be thrown upon the land, which they regarded as the sole source of wealth. They advocated free trade, free agriculture, free industry, while they cared little for freedom itself. Others like Morelly, the author of the Code de la Nature, accepted the Economist theory of the omnipotence of the State, but added other theories of their own. Morelly proposed to establish community of goods and uniformity of all conditions. He denounced the institution of private property, and he shadowed forth in their earliest shape many of those suggestions for the readjustment of the world, which have since assumed the name of Socialism and acquired the dimensions of a spectre in minds intolerant of change.

But far above the sound of other voices rose the lofty tones and the sonorous rhetoric of Rousseau. Rousseau disdained the study and analysis of the past, in which Montesquieu had sought laborious wisdom. He cared nothing for the diffusion of knowledge and art, of which Voltaire was the brilliant representative. He hardly understood the wide, ambitious projects, by which Diderot and Turgot hoped to benefit humanity. He resented the utilitarian theories of Helvetius. He hotly denied the material philosophy of the school of Holbach. To Rousseau's angry discontent with life, study, knowledge, cultivation, seemed to be only steps in the degradation of man. To his inflamed vision all society was artificial, all accepted forms of political organisation were tyranny and abuse. Man, he protested, was naturally good and just and loving, created by a just and loving God, until art, the bane of life, invaded his simplicity, tainted his virtue, and brought him face to face with suffering and sin. Sweep away therefore, he exhorted his hearers, all the false fabric of society, the world of ugly want and insolent riches miscalled civilization, the oppression miscalled order, the error miscalled knowledge! Level its inequalities, repudiate its learning, break its conventions, shatter its chains! Let men return to the simplicity of ancient days, to the idyllic state, when uncorrupted instinct only ruled them, and there once again, innocent and ignorant, as Nature made them, and guided only by the 'immortal and celestial voice' of reason, seek the high paths of felicity of life.

In a generation full of privilege and hardship, and weary of its own artificial ways, such teaching as this struck a resounding chord. It did not matter that the teacher reconciled a rather sordid practice with a gorgeous theory, and was himself too often morbid, egotistical, unmanly, mean. The disciples, who drank in his doctrines, did not enquire critically into his motives. They did not ask—and possibly we have not the right to speculate—whether he assailed society, because he failed to shine in it, or whether he inveighed against riches, because he lacked the patient industry to earn them for himself. They did not know or care whether his quarrel with the world, his indictment of its usages and laws, his eloquent defence of human instinct, and his sensuous love for Nature, were or were not dictated by the feverish longing which possessed the man to follow every impulse of his mind, and to submit his impulses to no control. They did not see that the example of a master, who, whatever shameful faults he might commit, could still maintain that civilization, and not he, deserved the blame, and could still gravely describe himself to his friends as one of the best men that he had ever known, was only too well calculated to enable his disciples to persuade themselves that they were instruments of virtue, purity and justice, while they were permitting iniquity and palliating crime. They knew that his denunciation of oppression coincided with the bitter lessons which their experience taught. They found that his eloquent words renewed their self-respect, and raised their ideal of the dignity of man. They felt that he pleaded the cause of the unfortunate in tones and with a genius which made the fortunate attend, and that he brought to that exalted service the widest compassion, the readiest sympathy, and the most majestic language which the eighteenth century had heard.

In 1762, Rousseau published one of the most famous, and, in its consequences, probably one of the most important books ever written. 'Man was born free,' ran the prologue to the Contrat Social,—'man was born free, and is everywhere in chains.' In the Contrat Social Rousseau rejected altogether the historic method—that wise process of political philosophy, which patiently studies the circumstances of the past, in order, by the experience so obtained, to modify and to improve the present. Relying on the unsafe methods of abstract, a priori speculation, he proceeded to develop, out of his ardent and imaginative brain, an ideal theory of society, which should establish by logical and conclusive argument the opinions which his sentiments had already espoused. The result of the enterprise was the celebrated doctrine of the Sovereignty of Peoples. The origin of every human society, argued Rousseau, was this:—At some remote epoch in the dawn of days, men, living in a state of nature, virtuous, rational, equal and free, had resolved to enter into an association to defend the persons and property of all, while every individual in it remained free. Accordingly, they had formed a Social Compact, under which each individual had submitted himself to the direction of the general will, and had been received as an inseparable part of the whole. The body formed by this Social Compact was the Sovereign. All citizens who belonged to it—and all did—had an equal share in the common sovereignty, and were bound to one another by a fraternal tie. Its sovereignty consisted in the exercise of the general will, and that sovereignty could not be alienated to any individual or group, nor could it be divided up into different parts and distributed among different officials. The will of the sovereign body was expressed in laws, and every member of it must take his part personally, and not by delegation, in the making of those laws. If he delegated that right to representatives, he surrendered his share of sovereign power. For the sake of convenience, the sovereign body might delegate to governments certain executive powers for a limited time; but the sovereign body still retained the right of resuming or modifying those powers at will, and must from time to time assemble, in order to enforce its right. When the whole sovereign people was thus assembled, the power of governments ceased, and all executive authority was suspended. If any government usurped the sovereignty, the Social Compact was thereby broken; all citizens resumed their liberty to act, and might rise in rebellion to assert it. Lastly, in religion, the sovereign body was entitled to impose a civil profession of faith, and to compel all its citizens, under penalties of banishment and death, to believe in the existence of a beneficent God, in an immortal life, in the reward of the just and the chastisement of the wicked, in the obligation of the Social Contract and of the laws.

It is easy in these days to criticise the Contrat Social. The mistaken idea of compact as the basis of society; the rejection of representative legislatures, and the insistence on a principle which could only apply in a miniature State—the personal participation of every citizen in the making of the laws; the sanction given to the right of insurrection, when the imaginary compact was broken; the absence of any method of ascertaining whether the compact were broken or not;—these are flaws in its argument which will readily occur. It is easy also to point to certain characteristics which disfigure it throughout—to its disregard of facts, to its sophistry and inconsistencies, to the narrow intolerance of its sentimental theology, to its aloofness from the region of practice, to its reliance on dogma and on the logic of words. But it is not so easy to appreciate the extraordinary impression which in those days it produced, or the enthusiasm aroused in all who looked for liberty, by the fearless splendour of its phrases, by the fused argument and passion of its style, by its generous democratic temper, by the spiritual earnestness which inspired it, by its fine exaltation of patriotism and freedom. The Contrat Social supplied the text and lit the fire of revolution. It became the gospel of the Jacobin party, and of that party Robespierre constituted himself high-priest.

The seed sown by these remarkable writers fell upon fruitful soil. The years which immediately preceded the outbreak of the Revolution in France were years of vague but widespread agitation. An enthusiasm for the natural greatness of man, and a boundless contempt for the age and society in which he lived, pervaded the thought of the time. In almost every European country, observers noticed the same presentiment of impending change, and of a change which, on behalf of humanity, most people were prepared to welcome. Thinkers and talkers alike were full of illusions, full of curiosity, full of unselfishness, full of hope. Outside France, as within it, everyone plunged into philosophical debate. In the trading cities of Germany, merchants and manufacturers would gather, after the day's work, to discuss the condition of the human race. Sovereigns like Frederick, Catherine, and Joseph affected the secure radicalism of despots. In Spain, in Portugal, in Tuscany, as well as in England and France, statesmen echoed the new humanitarian maxims. Aranda, Pombal and Manfredini exhibited the spirit, and emulated the reforms, of Turgot and Necker, of Fox and Pitt. The outbreak of the American Revolution roused the deepest interest in Europe. Volunteers from France poured over to America, to fight for the political ideals, about which they had for so long been dreaming, and the realisation of which in the New World seemed to bring home conviction to the Old. The tidings of the triumph of the American colonists were received with acclamation in the roadsteads of Elsinore. Strangely enough, the feverish unrest of the time produced, in an age which professed to have undertaken a war against superstition, a revival of the mysticism of an earlier day. On the eve of the French Revolution, the best educated classes in Europe were engrossed by secret societies and brotherhoods, like the Illuminati, the Swedenborgians, the Mesmerists, the Rosicrucians, dabbling on all sides in necromancy and occult science, and frequently the dupes of ridiculous impostors, who, catching the temper of the times, proposed to effect by charlatanism the regeneration of the world.

This vague perturbation of spirit did not, it is true, penetrate to the lowest or unlettered class. But in all above that rank it was conspicuous. The years of the reign of Louis XVI were in France, as in nearly all parts of Europe, years of national expansion. The trade of the country was advancing by leaps and bounds, and the commerce of Bordeaux already exceeded, in the sober judgment of Arthur Young, that of any English port save London. At the same time the wealth of the middle classes was increasing with similar rapidity. Year after year they lent more money to the Government; and year after year, as they saw the Government wasting it with reckless profusion, and falling steadily deeper into debt, they ranged themselves more decidedly in the ranks of opposition, and became more emphatic in their discontent. The gross mismanagement of the finances became a matter in which they felt they had a right to interfere. Their stake in the game of politics made them politicians, and not only that—it made them reformers too. And thus the growing wealth of the country tended indirectly to multiply the enemies of the Court, and to throw on to the side of revolution that important financial interest, which is generally a stable, sometimes an obstructive, element in a State.

In other ways also, by the end of the century, in their style of living, in their education, in their enlightenment, the middle classes had become the equals of the nobles. They had imbibed the same philosophy; they had cultivated the same tastes; they contemplated with the same sublime ignorance of history and politics the philanthropic ideas of the age; and they resented, even more bitterly than before, the exclusive and exacting privileges of caste. At the same time, the nobles, on their side, were losing, under the benign influence of philosophy, a great deal of the apathetic insolence, which had made their privileges hateful. The Court of Louis XVI was very different from that of his predecessors. It was less pompous, less artificial. The rules of etiquette were relaxed. A better tone prevailed in its society. The haughtiest nobles opened their doors freely to lowborn genius. They debated republican theories in their drawing-rooms. They applauded republican sentiments in the theatres. They began dimly to realise their public duties, and in a tentative way to perform them. They awoke to the distress of the poor about them, and endeavoured to alleviate it with a generous hand. Some of the nobility proposed to surrender their immunity from taxation. Others, headed by the King, emancipated the serfs who still remained on their estates. The Marquis de Mirabeau established a gratuitous office for the settlement of law-suits. The Duchesse de Bourbon rose early in the morning, to visit with alms the garrets of the poor. The Queen laid out a village at the Trianon, where, attired in a muslin gown and a straw hat, she could fish in the lake and see her cows milked. The King multiplied his private charities, and, one severe winter, commanded that all the poor, who came, should be fed daily in the royal kitchens. On all sides, among the upper classes of society, the same symptoms showed themselves. Extravagant but kindhearted sensibility became the mainspring of their actions; reform was their passion, limitless, radiant hope their creed. 'With no regret for the past,' says one of their number, looking back from the sere contemplation of later years on that entrancing morning of his life,—'with no regret for the past and no apprehensions for the future, we danced gaily along a carpet of flowers stretched over an abyss.'