If by some miracle it could have been eliminated from the revolutionary Assemblies, their conduct would have been quite other than it was, and the Revolution itself would have taken a very different direction.
Ambition, Envy, Vanity, &c.--In normal times the influence of these various affective elements is forcibly contained by social necessities.Ambition, for instance, is necessarily limited in a hierarchical form of society.Although the soldier does sometimes become a general, it is only after a long term of service.In time of revolution, on the other hand, there is no need to wait.Every one may reach the upper ranks almost immediately, so that all ambitions are violently aroused.The humblest man believes himself fitted for the highest employments, and by this very fact his vanity grows out of all measure.
All the passions being more or less aroused, including ambition and vanity, we see the development of jealousy and envy of those who have succeeded more quickly than others.
The effect of jealousy, always important in times of revolution, was especially so during the great French Revolution.Jealousy of the nobility constituted one of its most important factors.
The middle classes had increased in capacity and wealth, to the point of surpassing the nobility.Although they mingled with the nobles more and more, they felt, none the less, that they were held at a distance, and this they keenly resented.This frame of mind had unconsciously made the bourgeoisie keen supporters of the philosophic doctrine of equality.
Wounded self-love and jealousy were thus the causes of hatreds that we can scarcely conceive today, when the social influence of the nobility is so small.Many members of the Convention--Carrier, Marat, and others--remembered with anger that they had once occupied subordinate positions in the establishments of great nobles.Mme.Roland was never able to forget that, when she and her mother were invited to the house of a great lady under the ancien regime, they had been sent to dine in the servants' quarters.
The philosopher Rivarol has very well described in the following passage, already cited by Taine, the influence of wounded self-love and jealousy upon the revolutionary hatreds:--``It is not,'' he writes, ``the taxes, nor the lettres de cachet, nor any of the other abuses of authority; it is not the sins of the intendants, nor the long and ruinous delays of justice, that has most angered the nation; it is the prejudices of the nobility for which it has exhibited the greatest hatred.
What proves this clearly is the fact that it is the bourgeois, the men of letters, the men of money, in fact all those who are jealous of the nobility, who have raised the poorer inhabitants of the cities against them, and the peasants in the country districts.''
This very true statement partly justifies the saying of Napoleon:
``Vanity made the Revolution; liberty was only the pretext.''
Enthusiasm.--The enthusiasm of the founders of the Revolution equalled that of the apostles of the faith of Mohammed.And it was really a religion that the bourgeois of the first Assembly thought to found.They thought to have destroyed an old world, and to have built a new one upon its ruins.Never did illusion more seductive fire the hearts of men.Equality and fraternity, proclaimed by the new dogmas, were to bring the reign of eternal happiness to all the peoples.Man had broken for ever with a past of barbarity and darkness.The regenerated world would in future be illuminated by the lucid radiance of pure reason.On all hands the most brilliant oratorical formulae saluted the expected dawn.
That this enthusiasm was so soon replaced by violence was due to the fact that the awakening was speedy and terrible.One can readily conceive the indignant fury with which the apostles of the Revolution attacked the daily obstacles opposed to the realisation of their dreams.They had sought to reject the past, to forget tradition, to make man over again.But the past reappeared incessantly, and men refused to change.The reformers, checked in their onward march, would not give in.
They sought to impose by force a dictatorship which speedily made men regret the system abolished, and finally led to its return.
It is to be remarked that although the enthusiasm of the first days did not last in the revolutionary Assemblies, it survived very much longer in the armies, and constituted their chief strength.To tell the truth, the armies of the Revolution were republican long before France became so, and remained republican long after France had ceased to be so.
The variations of character considered in this chapter, being conditioned by certain common aspirations and identical changes of environment, finally became concrete in a small number of fairly homogeneous mentalities.Speaking only of the more characteristic, we may refer them to four types: the Jacobin, mystic, revolutionary, and criminal mentalities.
