Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century

Let us avoid misunderstanding of what we are now speaking. Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century in France displayed a convulsion, a frenzy, a chaos such as the world’s history has not often equalled. There was folly, crime, waste, destruction, confusion, and horror of stupendous proportions, and of all imaginable forms. There was the Terror, the Festival of Reason, the Reaction, and all the delirium, the orgy, the extravagance, which give brilliancy to small historians and serve as rhetoric to petty politicians. Assuredly the revolution closed in with most ghastly surprises to the philanthropists and philosophers who entered on it in 1789 with so light a heart.

Assuredly it has bequeathed to the statesmen and the people of our century problems of portentous difficulty and number. But we are speaking now neither of ’93 nor of ’95, nor of ’99, of no local or special incident, of no single event, nor of political forms. We are in this essay dealing exclusively with ‘ the ideas of ’89/ with the movement which at Versailles, on 5th May 1789, took outward and visible shape. And we are about to deal with it in its deeper, social, permanent sofia sightseeing, and human side, not in its transitory and material side. The Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone have washed away the blood which once defiled their streams, the havoc caused by the orgies of anarchy has been effaced, years make fainter the memory of crimes and follies, of revenge and jealousy. But the course of generations still deepens the meaning of ‘the ideas of ’89,’ of the social, intellectual, economic new birth which then received official recognition, opening in a conscious and popular form the reformation that, in a spontaneous form, had long been brooding in so many generous hearts and profound brains.

No reading of merely French history, no study of the reign of Louis xvi. by itself, can explain this great movement—no political history, no narrative of events, no account of any special institution. Neither the degeneration of the monarchy, nor the corruption of the nobility, nor the disorder of the administration, nor the barbarism of the feudal law, nor the decay of the Church, nor the vices of society, nor the teaching of any school, nor all of these together — are adequate to explain the revolution.

They are enough to account for the confusion, waste, conflict, and fury of the contest — i.e. for the explosion. But they do not explain how it is that hardly anything was set up in France between 1789 and 1799 which had not been previously discussed and prepared, that between 1789 and 1799 an immense body of new institutions and reformed methods of social life were firmly planted in such a way that they have borne fruit far and wide in France and through Europe.

Religious fanaticism

Nor do any of these special causes just enumerated suffice to explain the passion, the contagious faith, the almost religious fanaticism which was the inner strength of the revolution and the source of its inexhaustible activity. What we call the French Revolution of 1789, was really a new phase of civilisation announcing its advent in form. It had the character of religious zeal because it was a movement of the human race towards a completer humanity.

Rhetoricians, poets, and preachers have accustomed us too long to dwell on the lurid side of the movement, on its follies, crimes, and failures; they have overrated the relative importance of the catastrophe, and by profuse pictures of the horrors, they have drawn off attention from its solid and enduring fruits. In the midst of the agony it was natural that Burke, in the sunset of his judgment, should denounce it. But it was a misfortune for the last generation that the purple mantle of Burke should have fallen on a prophet, who was not a statesman but a man of letters, who, with all Burke’s passion and prejudice, had but little of his philosophic power, none of his practical sagacity, none of the great Whig’s experience of affairs and of men.

The universal bonfire ’ theory, the ‘ grand suicide ’ view, the ‘ chaos-come-again ’ of a former generation, are seen to be ridiculous in ours. The movement of 1789 was far less the final crash of an effete system than it was the new birth of a greater system, or rather of the irresistible germs of a greater system. The contemporaries of Tacitus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius could see nothing but ruin in the superstition of the Galileans, just as the contemporaries of Decius, Julian, and Justinian saw nothing but barbarism in the Goths, the Franks, and the Arabs.