THE OPINIONS OF HISTORIANS CONCERNING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION1.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 role 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.
2.The Theory of Fatalism in respect of the Revolution.
