1. The importance of the study of Religious Revolutions
in respect of the comprehension of the great Political
Revolutions.
A PORTION of this work will be devoted to the French
Revolution. It was full of acts of violence which naturally had
their psychological causes.
These exceptional events will always fill us with
astonishment, and we even feel them to be inexplicable. They
become comprehensible, however, if we consider that the French
Revolution, constituting a new religion, was bound to obey the
laws which condition the propagation of all beliefs. Its fury
and its hecatombs will then become intelligible.
In studying the history of a great religious revolution,
that of the Reformation, we shall see that a number of
psychological elements which figured therein were equally active
during the French Revolution. In both we observe the
insignificant bearing of the rational value of a belief upon its
propagation, the inefficacy of persecution, the impossibility of
tolerance between contrary beliefs, and the violence and the
desperate struggles resulting from the conflict of different
faiths. We also observe the exploitation of a belief by
interests quite independent
of that belief. Finally we see that it is impossible to modify
the convictions of men without also modifying their existence.
These phenomena verified, we shall see plainly why the
gospel of the Revolution was propagated by the same methods as
all the religious gospels, notably that of Calvin. It could not
have been propagated otherwise.
But although there are close analogies between the genesis
of a religious revolution, such as the Reformation, and that of a
great political revolution like our own, their remote
consequences are very different, which explains the difference of
duration which they display. In religious revolutions no
experience can reveal to the faithful that they are deceived,
since they would have to go to heaven to make the discovery. In
political revolutions experience quickly demonstrates the error
of a false doctrine and forces men to abandon it.
Thus at the end of the Directory the application of
Jacobin beliefs had led France to such a degree of ruin, poverty,
and despair that the wildest Jacobins themselves had to renounce
their system. Nothing survived of their theories except a few
principles which cannot be verified by experience, such as the
universal happiness which equality should bestow upon humanity.
