1. The Historians of the Revolution.
THE most contradictory opinions have been expressed respecting
the French Revolution, and although only a century separates us
from the period in question it seems impossible as yet to judge
it calmly. For de Maistre it was “a satanic piece of
work,” and “never was the action of the spirit of
darkness so evidently manifested.” For the modern Jacobins
it has regenerated the human race.
Foreigners who live in France still regard it as a subject
to be avoided in conversation.
“Everywhere,” writes Barrett Wendell, “this
memory and these traditions are still endowed with such vitality
that few persons are capable of considering them dispassionately.
They still excite both enthusiasm and resentment; they are still
regarded with a loyal and ardent spirit of partisanship. The
better you come to understand France the more clearly you see
that even to-day no study of the
Revolution strikes any Frenchman as having been impartial.”
This observation is perfectly correct. To be
interpretable with equity, the events of the past must no
longer be productive of results and must not touch the
religious or political beliefs whose inevitable intolerance
I have denoted.
We must not therefore be surprised that historians express
very different ideas respecting the Revolution. For a long time
to come some will still see in it one of the most sinister events
of history, while to others it will remain one of the most
glorious. All writers on the subject have believed that they
have related its course with impartiality, but in general they
have merely supported contradictory theories of peculiar
simplicity. The documents being innumerable and contradictory,
their conscious or unconscious choice has readily enabled them to
justify their respective theories.
The older historians of the Revolution—Thiers, Quinet,
and, despite his talent, Michelet himself, are somewhat eclipsed
to-day. Their doctrines were by no means complicated; a historic
fatalism prevails generally in their work. Thiers regarded the
Revolution as the result of several centuries of absolute
monarchy, and the Terror as the necessary consequence of foreign
invasion. Quinet described the excesses of 1793 as the result of
a long-continued despotism, but declared that the tyranny of the
Convention was unnecessary, and hampered the work of the
Revolution. Michelet saw in this last merely the work of the
people, whom he blindly admired, and commenced the glorification
continued by other historians.
The former reputation of all these historians has
been to a great extent effaced by that of Taine. Although
equally impassioned, he threw a brilliant light upon the
revolutionary period, and it will doubtless be long before his
work is superseded.
Work so important is bound to show faults. Taine is
admirable in the representation of facts and persons, but he
attempts to judge by the standard of rational logic events which
were not dictated by reason, and which, therefore, he cannot
interpret. His psychology, excellent when it is merely
descriptive, is very weak as soon as it becomes explanatory. To
affirm that Robespierre was a pedantic “swotter” is not
to reveal the causes of his absolute power over the Convention,
at a time when he had spent several months in decimating it with
perfect impunity. It has very justly been said of Taine that he
saw well and understood little.
Despite these restrictions his work is highly remarkable
and has not been equalled. We may judge of his immense influence
by the exasperation which he causes among the faithful defenders
of Jacobin orthodoxy, of which M. Aulard, professor at the
Sorbonne, is to-day the high priest. The latter has devoted two
years to writing a pamphlet against Taine, every line of which is
steeped in passion. All this time spent in rectifying a few
material errors which are not really significant has only
resulted in the perpetration of the very same errors.
Reviewing his work, M. A. Cochin shows that M. Aulard has
at least on every other occasion been deceived by his quotations,
whereas Taine erred far more rarely. The same historian shows
also that we must not trust M. Aulard's sources.
“These sources—proceedings, pamphlets, journals,
and the speeches and writings of patriots—are precisely the
authentic publications of patriotism, edited by patriots, and
edited, as a rule, for the benefit of the public. He ought to
have seen in all this simply the special pleading of the
defendant: he had, before his eyes, a ready-made history of the
Revolution, which presents, side by side with each of the acts of
the `People,' from the massacres of September to the law of
Prairial, a ready-made explanation according to the republican
system of defence.”
Perhaps the fairest criticism that one can make of the
work of Taine is that it was left incomplete. He studied more
especially the rôle of the populace and its leaders
during the revolutionary period. This inspired him with pages
vibrating with an indignation which we can still admire, but
several important aspects of the Revolution escaped him.
Whatever one may think of the Revolution, an irreducible
difference will always exist between historians of the school of
Taine and those of the school of M. Aulard. The latter regards
the sovereign people as admirable, while the former shows us that
when abandoned to its instincts and liberated from all social
restraint it relapses into primitive savagery. The conception of
M. Aulard, entirely contrary to the lessons of the psychology of
crowds, is none the less a religious dogma in the eyes of modern
Jacobins. They write of the Revolution according to the methods
of believers, and take for learned works the arguments of virtual
theologians.
