2. The Theory of Fatalism in respect of the
Revolution.
Advocates and detractors of the Revolution often
admit the fatality of revolutionary events. This theory is well
synthetised in the following passage from the
History of the
Revolution, by Emile Olivier:—
“No man could oppose it. The blame belongs neither to
those who perished nor to those who survived; there was no
individual force capable of changing the elements and of
foreseeing the events which were born of the nature of things and
circumstances.”
Taine himself inclines to this idea:—
“At the moment when the States General were opened the
course of ideas and events was not only determined but even
visible. Each generation unwittingly bears within itself its
future and its past; from the latter its destinies might have
been foretold long before the issue.”
Other modern authors, who profess no more indulgence for
the violence of the revolutionaries than did Taine, are equally
convinced of this fatality. M. Sorel, after recalling the saying
of Bossuet concerning the revolutions of antiquity:
“Everything is surprising if we only consider particular
causes, and yet everything goes forward in regular sequence,”
expresses an intention which he very imperfectly realises:
“to show in the Revolution, which seems to some the
subversion and to others the regeneration of the old European
world, the natural and necessary result of the history of Europe,
and to show, moreover, that this revolution had no result—not
even the most unexpected—that did not ensue from this history,
and was not explained by the precedents of the ancien
régime.”
Guizot also had formerly attempted to prove that our
Revolution, which he quite wrongly compared to that of England,
was perfectly natural and effected no innovations:—
“Far from having broken with the natural course of
events in Europe, neither the English revolution nor our own did,
intended, or said anything that had not been said, intended, and
done a hundred years before its outbreak.
“ . . . Whether we regard the general doctrines of the
two revolutions or the application made of them—whether we deal
with the government of the State or with the civil legislation,
with property or with persons, with liberty or with power, we
shall find nothing of which the invention can be attributed to
them, nothing that will not be encountered elsewhere, or that was
not at least originated in times which we qualify as normal.”
All these assertions merely recall the banal law that a
phenomenon is simply the consequence of previous phenomena. Such
very general propositions do not teach us much.
We must not try to explain too many events by the
principle of fatality adopted by so many historians. I have
elsewhere discussed the significance of such fatalities, and have
shown that the whole effort of civilisation consists in trying to
escape therefrom. Certainly history is full of necessities, but
it is also full of contingent facts which were, and might not
have been. Napoleon himself, on St. Helena, enumerated six
circumstances which might have checked his prodigious career. He
related, notably, that on taking a bath at Auxonne, in 1786, he
only escaped death by the fortuitous presence of a sandbank. If
Bonaparte had died, then we may admit that another general would
have arisen, and might have become dictator. But what would have
become of the Imperial epic and its consequences
without the man of genius who led our victorious armies into all
the capitals of Europe?
It is permissible to consider the Revolution as being
partly a necessity, but it was above all—which is what the
fatalistic writers already cited do not show us—a permanent
struggle between theorists who were imbued with a new ideal, and
the economic, social, and political laws which ruled mankind, and
which they did not understand. Not understanding them, they
sought in vain to direct the course of events, were exasperated
at their failure, and finally committed every species of
violence. They decreed that the paper money known as
assignats should be accepted as the equivalent of gold,
and all their threats could not prevent the fictitious value of
such money falling almost to nothing. They decreed the law of
the maximum, and it merely increased the evils it was intended to
remedy. Robespierre declared before the Convention “that all
the sans-culottes will be paid at the expense of the
public treasury, which will be fed by the rich,” and in spite
of requisitions and the guillotine the treasury remained empty.
Having broken all human restraints, the men of the
Revolution finally discovered that a society cannot live without
them; but when they sought to create them anew they saw that even
the strongest society, though supported by the fear of the
guillotine, could not replace the discipline which the past had
slowly built up in the minds of men. As for understanding the
evolution of society, or judging men's hearts and minds, or
foreseeing the consequences of the laws they enacted, they
scarcely attempted to do so.
The events of the Revolution did not ensue from
irreducible necessities. They were far more the consequence of
Jacobin principles than of circumstances, and might have been
quite other than they were. Would the Revolution have followed
the same path if Louis XVI. had been better advised, or if the
Constituent Assembly had been less cowardly in times of popular
insurrection? The theory of revolutionary fatality is only
useful to justify violence by presenting it as inevitable.
Whether we are dealing with science or with history we
must beware of the ignorance which takes shelter under the
shibboleth of fatalism Nature was formerly full of a host of
fatalities which science is slowly contriving to avoid. The
function of the superior man is, as I have shown elsewhere, to
avert such fatalities.
