But how can I hesitate, when I find these conclusions of mine not obscurely foreshadowed as impending in 1872 by Ernest Renan, and re-affirmed as imminent in 1882 by Jules Simon?
'The edifice of our chimæras,' cried Ernest Renan in 1872,[9] 'has melted away like fairy castles in a dream.
Presumption, puerile vanity, insubordination, feather-headedness, inability to grasp many different ideas at a glance, want of scientific sense, simple and stupid ignorance, here is the summary of our history for a year!... The Opposition, which pretended to have revolutionary remedies for all possible ills, has found itself at the end of a few days as unpopular as the fallen dynasty. The Republican Party, puffed up with the fatal errors which for half a century have been current as to the history of the Revolution, and which imagined itself able to play over again a game won eighty years ago only through circumstances utterly unlike those of to-day, has learned that it was a lunatic taking visions for realities. The legend of the Empire has been slain by Napoleon III. The legend of 1792 has been done to death by M. Gambetta. The legend of the Terror (for even the Terror had its legend among us!) has been hideously parodied by the Commune.'
So cried M. Renan in 1872.
'Our worst disasters,' said M. Jules Simon in 1882,[10] 'have so far broken out only where great numbers of men are crowded together. Men begin with scepticism, from scepticism they go on rapidly to Nihilism, and from Nihilism to Social War. The labourer in the fields still has his faith; he still has his hope of another life; he has not yet unlearned the name of God. When he becomes a Nihilist we shall have the Commune in our cities, and beyond them the Jacqueries! It is impossible that the authorities should not see this. But the authorities obey the deputy, the deputy obeys the elector, and the elector obeys the agitator.'
'There will soon be only two parties left in France; the party of the dynamiters, and the party of the do-nothings. Whatever moderate Republicans are left must go over either to violence or to indifference. Is it France alone which is thus threatened? It is the world. The Communists and the Fenians were not produced in France. But France attracts them.
'The liberty you pretend to be establishing is oppression. The neutral education you propose is the suppression of the human heart, of the human conscience.
'This "clericalism" which you declare to be the enemy, and which, when you are pushed to the wall, turns out to be Christianity—this "clericalism" which you attack and mean to exterminate, tell me, is this the power which lays your Ministers prostrate before your Deputies, and your Deputies prostrate before their electors? Is it "clericalism" which is stirring up Labour against Capital? Is it "clericalism" which preaches and supports "strikes"? Is it "clericalism" which manufactures dynamite and blows up houses? Is it "clericalism" which is transforming your literature into ribaldry and your theatres into brothels? Is it "clericalism" which shuts up your schools? Is it "clericalism" which transforms all the actions and relations of life into matters of contract and of calculation? Do you imagine that Christianity, if it be your enemy, is an enemy as terrible as Nihilism? And what other end but Nihilism can there be of your "neutral" obligatory schools and your atheistic laws? Already you go in fear of the very phrase which recognises the duties of man to God! You think it dangerous, you think it equivocal! You do not know that when you recoil before the name of God you abandon the traditions of France!
'Nay, you will not even hear now of man's duties to his country! This is another "dangerous," another "equivocal" phrase! You talk now in your programmes about the "civic duties" of man, for when these are taught there will be no danger of confounding the Monarchical France before 1789, which we must learn to hate, with the Republican France which we must love and admire!'