 Section 1. The French Revolution. This is a LibreVox recording. All LibreVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibreVox.org. The French Revolution by Hilaire Belloc. Section 1. Preface. The object of these few pages is not to recount once more the history of the revolution. That can be followed in any one of a hundred textbooks. Their object is rather to lay, if that be possible, an explanation of it before the English reader, so that he may understand both what it was and how it proceeded, and also why certain problems hitherto unfamiliar to Englishmen have risen out of it. First, therefore, it is necessary to set down clearly, without modern accretion, that political theory which was a sort of religious creed supplying the motive force of the whole business, of the new civil code, as of the massacres, of the panics and capitulations, as of the victories, of successful transformation of society, as of the conspicuous failures in detail which still menace the achievement of the revolution. This grasp, the way in which the main events followed each other, and the reason of their interlocking and proceeding as they did, must be put forward. Not I repeat in the shape of a chronicle, but in the shape of a thesis. Thus the reader must know not only that the failure of the royal family's flight was followed by war, but how and why it was followed by war. He must not only appreciate the severity of the government of the great committee, but why that severity was present, and of the conditions of the war upon which it reposed. But in so explaining the development of the movement, it is necessary to select for appreciation, as the chief figures, the characters of the time, since upon their will and manner depended the fate of the whole. For instance, had the queen been French, either in blood or in sympathy, had the king been alert, had any one character retain the old religious motives, all history would have been changed, and this human company must be seen if its action and drama are to be comprehended. The reader interested in that capital event should further seize and, but too rarely, has an opportunity for seizing its military aspect, and this difficulty of his proceeds from two causes. The first, that historians, even when they recognize the importance of the military side of some past movement, are careless of the military aspect, and think it sufficient to relate particular victories and general actions. The military aspect of any period does not consist in these, but in the campaigns of which actions, however decisive, are but incidental parts. In other words, the reader must seize the movement and design of armies if he is to seize a military period, and these are not commonly given him. In the second place, the historian, however much alive to the importance of military affairs, too rarely presents them as a part of a general position. He will make his story a story of war, or again a story of civilian development, and the reader will fail to see how the two combine. Now the revolution, more than any other modern period, turns upon and is explained by its military history. On this account has so considerable a space been devoted to the explaining of that feature. The reader will note again that the quarrel between the revolution and the Catholic Church has also been dealt with at length. To emphasize this aspect of the revolutionary struggle may seem unusual and perhaps deserves a word of apology. The reader is invited to consider the fact that the revolution took place in a country which had in the first place definitely determined during the religious struggle of the 16th and 17th centuries to remaining communion with Rome, and had in the second place admitted a very large and important body of converts to the doctrines of the Reformation. The determination of the French people in the crisis of 1572 to 1610 to remain Catholic under a strong central government was a capital point in the future history of France. So was the presence of a wealthy, very large, and highly cultivated body of dissensions in the midst of the nation. The two phenomena hardly coexisted elsewhere in Europe. Between them they lent to the political history of France a peculiar character which the 19th century, even more than the revolution itself, has emphasized. And it is the opinion of the present writer that it is impossible to understand the revolution unless very high relief is given to the religious problem. If a personal point may be noted, the fact that the writer of these pages is himself a Catholic and in political sympathy strongly attached to the political theory of the revolution should not be hidden from the reader. Such personal conditions have perhaps enabled him to treat the matter more thoroughly than it might have been treated by one who rejected either Republicanism upon the one hand or Catholicism upon the other. But he believes that no personal and therefore exaggerated note has been allowed to intrude upon his description of what is a definite piece of objective history lying in the field of record rather than in that of opinion. Some years ago the paramount importance of the quarrel between the church and the revolution might still have been questioned by men who had no personal experience of the struggle and of its vast results. Today the increasing consequences and the contemporary violence of that quarrel make its presentation an essential part of any study of the period. The scheme thus outlined will show why I have given this sketch the divisions in which it lies. Hilaire Bellach, Kingsland, January 1911. The end of Section 1. The end of the preface. Section 2, The French Revolution. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The French Revolution by Hilaire Bellach. Section 2, Chapter 1, The Political Theory of the Revolution. The political theory upon which the revolution proceeded has, especially in this country, suffered ridicule as local, as ephemeral, and as fallacious. It is universal, it is eternal, and it is true. It may be briefly stated, thus, that a political community pretending to sovereignty, that is pretending to a moral right of defending its existence against all other communities, derives the civil and temporal authority of its laws, not from its actual rulers, nor even from its majesty, but from itself. But the community cannot express authority unless it possesses corporate initiative. That is, unless the mass of its component units are able to combine for the purpose of a common expression, our conscious of a common will, and have something in common which makes the whole sovereign indeed. It may be that this power of corporate initiative and of corresponding corporate expression is forbidden to men. In that case, no such thing as a sovereign community can be said to exist. In that case, patriotism, public opinion, the genius of a people, are terms without meaning. But the human race in all times and in all places has agreed that such terms have meaning, and the conception that a community can so live, order, and be itself, is a human conception, as consonant to the nature of man as is his sense of right and wrong. It is much more intimately a part of that nature than are the common accidents determining human life, such as nourishment, generation, or repose. Nay, more intimate a part of it than anything which attaches to the body. This theory of political morals, though subject to a limitless degradation in practice, underlies the argument of every man who pretends to regard the conduct of the state as a business affecting the conscience of citizens. Upon it relies every protest against tyranny and every denunciation of foreign aggression. He that is most enamored of some set machinery for the government of men and who regards the sacramental function of an hereditary monarch as in Russia, the organic character of a native oligarchy as in England, the mechanical arrangement of election by majorities, or even in a crisis, the intense conviction and therefore the intense activity and conclusive power of great crowds as salutary to the state, will invariably, if any one of these engines fail him in the achievement of what he desires for his country, fall back upon the doctrine of an ultimately sovereign community. He will complain that though an election has defeated his ideal, yet true national tradition and true national sentiment were upon his side. If he defends the action of a native oligarchy against the leaders of the populace, he does so by an explanation, more or less explicit, that the oligarchy is more truly national, that it is more truly communal than the engineered expression of opinion of which the demagogue, as he will call them, have been mouthpieces. Even in blaming men for criticizing or restraining an hereditary monarch, the inherent of that monarch will blame them upon the ground that their action is anti-national, that it is anti-communal, and in a word no man pretending to sanity can challenge, in matters temporal and civil, the ultimate authority of whatever is felt to be, though with what difficulty it is not defined, the general civic sense which builds up in a state. Those words civil and temporal must lead the reader to the next consideration, which is that the last authority of all does not reside even in the community. It must be admitted by all those who have considered their own nature and that of their fellow beings, that the ultimate authority in any act is God, or if the name of God sound unusual to an English publication today, then what now takes the place of it for many, an imperfect phrase, the moral sense. Thus if there be cast together in some abandoned place a community of a few families so depraved, or so necessitous that against the teachings of their own consciences as well as knowing that they are doing is what we call wrong, yet they will unanimously agree to do it. Then that agreement of theirs, though certainly no temporal or civil authority can be quoted against it, is yet unjustifiable. Another authority lies behind. Still more evidently, would this be true if of say twelve, seven decided, knowing the thing to be wrong, that the wrong thing should be done. Five stood out for the right, and yet the majority possessed by the seven should be determined a sufficient authority for the wrongful command. But it is to be noted that this axiom only applies where the authority of the moral law, God as the author of this book with due deference to his readers would prefer to say, is recognized and yet flouted. If those twelve families do sincerely believe such and such a general action to be right, then not only is there authority when they carry it into practice a civil and temporal authority. It is an authority absolute in all respects, and further if upon a division of opinion among them not perhaps a bare majority, nay perhaps not a majority at all, but at any rate a determinate current of opinion, determinate in intensity and in weight that is as well as in numbers, declares an action to be right, then that determinate weight of opinion gives to its resolve a political authority, not only civil and temporal but absolute. Beyond it and above it there is no appeal. In other words, men may justly condemn and justly have, in a thousand circumstances condemned, the theory that a mere decision on the major part of the community was necessarily right in morals. It is for that matter self-evident that if one community decides in one fashion, another also sovereign in the opposite fashion, both cannot be right. Reasoning men have also protested and justly against the conception that what a majority in numbers or even what is more compelling still, a unanimity of decision in a community, may order, may not only be wrong but may be something which that community has no authority to order since, though it possesses a civil and temporal authority, it acts against that ultimate authority which is its own consciousness of right. Men may and do justly protest against the doctrine that a community is incapable of doing deliberate evil. It is as capable of such an action as is an individual, but men nowhere do or can deny that the community acting as it thinks right is ultimately sovereign. There is no alternative to so plain a truth. Let us take it then as indubitable that where civil government is concerned, the community is supreme if only from the argument that no organ within the community can prove its right to withstand the corporate will when once that corporate will shall find expression. All arguments which are advanced against this prime axiom of political ethics are, when they are analyzed, found to repose upon a confusion of thought. Thus a man will say, this doctrine would lead my country to abandon her suzerainty over that other nation, but where I to consent to this I should be weakening my country to which I owe allegiance. The doctrine compels him to no such muddlement. The community of which he is a member is free to make its dispositions for safety and is bound to preserve its own life. It is for the oppressed to protest and to rebel. Similarly, men think that this doctrine in some way jars with the actual lethargy and actual imbecility of men in their corporate action. It does nothing of the kind. This lethargy, that imbecility and all the other things that limit the application of the doctrine in no way touch its right reason any more than the fact that the speech of all men is imperfect contradicts the principle that man has a moral right to self-expression, that a dumb man cannot speak at all, but must write, is so far from a contradiction, a proof of the truth that speech is the prime expression of a man, and in the same way a community utterly without the power of expressing its corporate will is no contradiction, but a proof of the general rule that such expression and the imposing of such decisions are normal to mankind. The very oddity of the contrast between the abnormal and the normal aids us in our decision, and when we see a people conquered and not persuaded, yet making no attempt at rebellion or a people free from foreign oppression, yet bewildered at the prospect of self-government, the oddity of the phenomena proves our rule. But though all this be true, there stands against the statement of our political axiom, not a contradiction added, but a criticism, and all men with some knowledge of their fellows and of themselves at once perceive, first, that the psychology of corporate action differs essentially from the psychology of individual action, and secondly that, in proportion to the number, the discussions, the lack of intimacy, and in general the friction of the many, corporate action by a community, corporate self-realization, and the imposition of a corporate will varies from the difficult to the impossible. On this no words need be wasted. All men who reason and who observe are agreed that in proportion to distance, numbers, and complexity, the difficulty of self-expression within a community increases. We may get in a lively people explosions of popular will, violent, acute, and certainly real, but rare. We may attempt with the people more lethargic to obtain some reflection of popular will through the medium of a permanent machinery, of deputation which, less than any other, perhaps permits the great community to express itself truly. We may rely upon the national sympathies of an aristocracy or of a king, but in any case we know that the large communities can only indirectly and imperfectly express themselves where the permanent government of the whole interest is concerned. Our attachment, which may be passionate to the rights of the common will, we must satisfy either by demanding a loose federation of small self-governing states or submitting the central government of a large one to occasional insurrection and to violent corporate expression of opinion which shall readjust the relations between the governor and the governed. All this is true, but such a criticism of the theory and political morals which lay behind the revolution, the theory that the community is sovereign, is no contradiction. It only tells us that pure right cannot act untrammeled in human affairs and that it acts in some conditions more laboriously than in others. It gives not a jot of authority to any alternative thesis. Footnote one, we need not waste any time upon those who talk about such and such a form of government being good because it works. The use of such language connotes that the user of it is fatigued by the effort of thought. For what is working, for example, successful action in any sphere? The attainment of certain ends in that sphere? What are those ends in a state? If material well-being, then there is an end to talk of patriotism, the nation, public opinion, and the rest of it, which as we all very well know men have always regarded and always will regard as the supreme matters of public interest. If the end is not material well-being but a sense of political freedom and of the power of the citizen to react upon the state, then to say that an institution works, though apparently not democratic, is simply to say that under such and such conditions that institution achieves the ends of democracy most nearly. In other words, to contrast the good working of an institution superficially undemocratic with democratic theory is meaningless. The institution works in proportion as it satisfies that political sense which perfect democracy would, were it attainable, completely satisfied. The end of section two. Section three, the French Revolution. This is the Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org. The French Revolution by Hilaire Baloch. Section three, chapter one, concluded. Such is the general theory of the revolution to which the command of Jean-Jacques Rousseau over the French tongue gave imperishable expression. In that book, whose style and logical connection may be compared to some exact and strong piece of engineering. He entitled it The Contrat Social and it became the formula of the revolutionary creed. But though no man perhaps has put the prime truth of political morals so well, that truth was as old as the world. It appears in the passionate rhetoric of a hundred leaders and has stood at the head or has been woven into the laws of free states without number. In the English language, the Declaration of Independence is perhaps its noblest expression. And though this document was posterior to the great work of Rousseau, and though the genius of Jefferson was in some part descended from it, its language and still more the actions of those who drafted and supported it are sufficient to explain what I mean to the English readers. Now with this general theory, there stands connected on the one hand certain great principles without which it would have no meaning, and also on the other hand a number of minor points concerning no more than the machinery of politics. The first are vital to democracy. The second in spite of their great popularity at the time of the revolution and of the sanction which the revolution gave them, nay of their universality since the revolution have in reality nothing to do with the revolutionary theory itself. Of these two categories, the type of the first is the doctrine of the equality of man. The type of the second is the mere machinery called representative. The doctrine of the equality of the man is a transcendent doctrine, a dogma as we call such doctrines in the field of transcendental religion. It corresponds to no physical reality which we can grasp. It is hardly to be adumbrated even by metaphors drawn from physical objects. We may attempt to rationalize it by saying that what is common to all men is not more important but infinitely more important than the accident by which men differ. We may compare human attributes to tridimensional and personal attributes to bidimensional measurements. We may say that whatever man has of his nature is all the standards of man and we may show that in all such things men are potentially equal. None of these metaphors explains the matter. Still less do any of them satisfy the demand of those to whom the dogma may be incomprehensible. Its truth is to be arrived at for these in a negative manner. If men are not equal, then no scheme of jurisprudence, no act of justice, no movement of human indignation, no exaltation of fellowship has any meaning. The doctrine of the equality of man is one which like many of the great transcendental doctrines may be proved by the results consequent upon its absence. It is in man to believe it and all lively societies believe it. It is certainly not a man to prove the equality of men save as I have said by negation but it demands no considerable intellectual facility to perceive that void of the doctrine of equality. The conception of political freedom and a community's moral right to self government disappeared. Now to believe that doctrine positively and to believe it ardently to go on crusade for that religious point was indeed characteristic of the French. It required the peculiar and inherited religious temper of the French which had for so many hundred years seized and defined point after point in the character of man to grow enamored of this definition and to feel it not in the intellect but as it were in their bones. They became soldiers for it and that enormous march of theirs overrunning Europe which may not in aptly be compared to their adventures in the 12th century when they engaged upon the crusades was inspired by no one part of the doctrine of political freedom more strongly than by this doctrine of equality. The scorn which was in those days universally felt for that pride which associates itself with the things not inherent to a man notably and most absurdly with capricious differences of wealth never ran higher and the passionate sense of justice which springs from this profound and fundamental social dogma of equality as it moved France during the revolution to frenzy so also moved it to creation. Those who ask how it was that a group of men sustaining all the weight of civil conflict within and of universal war without yet made time enough in 20 years to frame the codes which govern modern Europe to lay down the foundation of universal education of a strictly impersonal scheme of administration and even in detail to remodel the material face of society in a word to make modern Europe must be content for their reply to learn that the republican energy had for its flame and its excitant this vision a sense almost physical of the equality of man the minor points which wove themselves into the political practice of democracy during the revolution which are not of its principles and which would not were they abstracted affect its essence are of quite another and less noble kind. I have taken as the chief of these the machinery of deputation or of representation the representative system had been designed for a particular purpose under the influence of the church and especially of the monastic orders who invented it in the middle ages it had been practiced as a useful check upon the national monarchy in France and as a useful form of national expression in times of crisis or when national initiative was peculiarly demanded in Spain it became as the middle ages preceded a very vital national and local thing varying from place to place it is not surprising that Spain seeing that in her territory the first experiments and representation were made should have thus preserved it popular and alive in England representation vigorous as everywhere else in the true middle ages narrowed and decayed at their close until in the 17th century it had become a mere scheme for aristocratic government in France for nearly 200 years before the revolution it had fallen into disuse but an active memory of it still remained especially a memory of its value in critical moments when a consultation of the whole people was required and when the corporate initiative of the whole people must be set at work in order to save the state it is no wonder therefore that the French on the eve of the revolution clamored for a revival of representation or as the system was called in its French tongue the state's general but as a permanent machine of government no one in Europe had the least idea how the system might serve the ends of democracy in England democracy was not practiced nor was representation connected with the conception of it the nation had forgotten democracy as completely as it had forgotten the religion and the old ideals of the middle ages in those parts of Christendom in which this ancient Christian institution of a parliament had not narrowed to be the mask of an oligarchy or dwindle to be a mere provincial custom its use had disappeared the ancient function of representation when it had been most lively and vigorous that is in the middle ages was occasionally to initiate a national policy in critical moments but more generally to grant taxes what a democratic parliament might do no one in 1789 could conceive there was indeed one great example of democratic representation in existence the example of the united states but the conditions were wholly different from those of Europe no true central power yet existed there no ancient central institution no crown nor any custom of the city the numbers over which american representative democracy then held power were not to be compared to the 25 millions who inhabited the french realm and even so most of what counted in their lives was regulated by a system of highly local autonomy for they were as scattered as they were few and the wisest and strongest and best were dependent upon slaves in europe i repeat the experiment was untried and it is one of the chief faults of the french revolutionaries that having been compelled in the critical moment of the opening of the revolution to the use of election and representation they envisioned the permanent use of a similar machinery as something sacred to and normal in the democratic state true they could not foresee modern parliamentarianism nothing could be more alien to their conception of the state than the deplorable method of government which parliamentarianism everywhere tends to introduce today true the french people during the revolutionary wars made short work of parliamentary theory and found it a more national thing to follow a soldier being by that time all soldiers themselves and to incarnate in a dictator the will of the nation but though the french revolutionaries could not have foreseen what we call parliamentarianism today and though the society from which they sprang made short work of the oligarchic pretensions of a parliament when the realities of the national struggle had to be considered yet they did as a fact pay an almost absurd reverence to the machinery of representation and election they went so far as to introduce it into their attempted reform of the church they introduced it everywhere into civil government from the smallest units to the highest they even for a moment played with the illusion in that most real of games which men can ever play at the business of arms they allowed the election of officers they were led to do this by that common fallacy more excusable in them than in us which confounds the individual will with the corporate a representative they thought could in some way be the permanent receptacle of his electorate they imagined that corporate initiative was always sufficiently active in no matter what divisions or subdivisions to react at once upon the deliott to guide him as may be guided by a driven animal or to command him as may be commanded as a servant it was in vain that rousseau the great exponent of the democratic theory upon which france attempted to proceed had warned posterity against the possible results of the representative system they fell into the air and it possesses many of their descendants to this day rousseau's searching mind perceived indeed no more than the general truth that men who consent to a representative system are free only while the representatives are not sitting but as is so often the case with institutions of genius though he saw not the whole of the evil he had put his finger upon its central spot and from that main and just principle which he laid down that under a merely representative system men cannot be really free flow all those evils which we now know to attach to this method of government what a rather clumsy epigram has called the audacity of elected persons is part of this truth the evidence spectacle of modern parliamentary nations driven against their will into economic conditions which appalled them proceeds again from the same truth the conspicuous and hardy contempt into which parliamentary institutions have everywhere fallen again proceeds from it and there proceeds from it that further derivative plague that the representatives themselves have now everywhere become more servile than the electorate and that in all parliamentary countries a few in triggers are the unworthy depositories of power and by their service of finance permit the money dealers to govern us all today Rousseau I say the chief prophet of the revolution had warned the French of this danger it is a capital example of his talent for the experiment of democratic representation had not yet in his time been tried but which much more is that power of his by which he not only stamped and issued the gold of democracy as it had never until then been minted no one man makes a people or their creed but Rousseau more than any other man made vocal the creed of a people and it is advisable or necessary for the reader of the revolution to consider at the outset of his reading of what nature was Rousseau's abundant influence upon the men who remodeled the society of Europe between 1789 and 1794 why did he dominate those five years and how was it that he dominated them increasingly an explanation of Rousseau's power merits a particular digression for few who express themselves in the English tongue have cared to understand it and in the academies provincial men have been content to deal with this great writer as though he were in some way inferior to themselves the end of section three the end of chapter one section four the french revolution this is a leper vox recording all leper vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibreVox.org the french revolution by Hiller Bellock section four chapter two Rousseau in order to appreciate what Rousseau meant to the revolutionary movement it is necessary to consider the effect of style upon men men are influenced by the word spoken or written the word is the organ of persuasion and therefore of moral government now degraded as that term has become in our time there is no proper term to express the exact use of words save the term style what words we use and in what order we put them is the whole matter of style and a man designed to influence his fellow men has therefore not one but two co-related instruments at his disposal he cannot use one without the other the weakness of the one will ruin the other these two instruments are his idea and his style however powerful native sympathetic to his hearer's mood or cogently provable by reference to new things may be a man's idea he cannot persuade his fellow man to it if he have not the words that express it and he will persuade them more and more in proportion as his words are well chosen and in the right order such order being determined by the genius of the language once they are drawn whether the idea of which rousseau made himself the exponent in his famous track be true or false need not further concern us in this little book we all know that the difficult attempt to realize political freedom has attracted various communities of men at various times and repelled others what english readers rarely here is that the triumph of rousseau depended not only on the first element in persuasion which is vision but also upon the second of the two co-related instruments by which a man may influence his fellows to wit style it was his choice of french words and the order in which he arranged them that gave him his enormous ascendancy over the generation which was young when he was old i have alluded to his famous tract the contract social and here a second point concerning it may be introduced this book which gave a text for the revolution the document to which its political theory could refer was by no means as foreign observers have sometimes imagined the whole body of writing for which rousseau was responsible to imagine that is to make the very common error of confusing a man with his books rousseau wrote on many things his character was of an exalted nervous and diseased sort its excessive sensibility degenerated with the advancing years into something not distinguishable from mania he wrote upon education and the glory of his style carried conviction both where he was right and where the short experience of a hundred years has proved him to have been holy role he wrote upon love and have the lessons to be drawn from his writing will be condemned by the same he wrote upon botany at vast length he wrote also upon music with what success in either department i am incompetent to determine he wrote upon human inequality and though the sentences were beautiful and the sentiment just the analysis was very insufficient and the historical conception bad he wrote upon a project for petrol peace which was rubbish and he wrote upon the government of poland an essay which was a perfect masterpiece but when a great writer writes each of his great writings has a life of its own and it was not any of these other writings of rousseau on love or botany which were the text of the revolution the text of the revolution was his contract social now it is not too much to say that never in the history of political theory has a political theory been put forward so lucidly so convincingly so tersely or so accurately as in this short and wonderful book the modern publisher in this country would be ashamed to print it not for its views which would now seem commonplace nor for its excellence which would ensure it a failure but for its brevity it is as short as the gospel and would cover but a hundred pages of one of our serious reviews a modern publisher in this city would not know what price to set upon such a work and the modern reader in this country would be puzzled to understand how a great thing could be got within so narrow a compass a debate in parliament or the liberator of a long pantomime is of greater volume nevertheless if it be closely read the contract social will be discovered to say all that can be said of the moral basis of democracy our ignorance of the historical basis of the state is presumed in the very opening lines of it the logical priority of the family to the state is the next statement the ridiculous and shameful argument that strength is the basis of authority which has never had standing save among the uninstructed or the superficial is contemptuously dismissed in a very simple proof which forms the third chapter and that chapter is not a page of a book in length it is with the fifth chapter that the powerful argument begins and the logical precedence of human association to any particular form of government is the foundation stone of that analysis it is this indeed which gives its title to the book the moral authority of men and community arises from conscious association or as an exact phraseology would have it a social contract all the business of democracy has based upon the only moral authority in a state follows from this first principle and is developed in rousseau's extraordinary achievement which much more than any other writing not religious has affected the destiny of mankind it is indeed astonishing to one who is well acquainted not only with the manner but with the manner of the contract social to remark what criticisms have been passed on it by those who have not read the work or having read it did so with an imperfect knowledge of the meaning of french words the two great counterarguments the one theoretic and the other practical which democracy has to meet stand luminously exposed in these pages though in so short a treatise the author might have been excused from considering them the theoretical argument against democracy is of course that man being prone to evil something external to him and indifferent to his passions must be put up to govern him the people will corrupt themselves but a despot or an oligarchy when it has satisfied its corrupt desires still has a wide margin over which it may rule well because it is indifferent you cannot bribe the despot or the oligarch beyond the limit of his own desires but a whole people can follow its own corrupt desires to the full and they will infect all government the full practice of democracy therefore says or so is better suited to angels than to men as to the practical argument that men are not sufficiently conscious of the state to practice democracy save in small communities that plea also is recognized and stated better than anyone else has stated it for there is not in this book an apology for democracy as a method of government but a statement of why and how democracy is right the silly confusion which regards a representative method as essentially democratic has never been more contemptuously dealt with nor more thoroughly than in the few words in which the contract social dismisses it forever though it was left to our own time to discover in the school of unpleasant experience how right was rousseau in this particular condemnation exegious as are the limits within which the great writer has finally decided the theory of democracy he finds space for side issues which nowhere else but in this book had been orderly considered in which when once one has heard them mentioned one sees to be of the most excellent wisdom that the fundamental laws or original and particular bonds of a new democracy must come from a source external to itself that is to the nature of the people for whom one is legislating however democratic the form of the state we must conform the particulars of law that a democracy cannot live without tribunes that no utterly inflexible law can be permitted in the state and hence the necessity for dictatorship in exceptional times that no code can foresee future details and so forth it would be a legitimate and entertaining task to challenge any man who had not read the contract social and this would include most academic writers upon the treatise to challenge any such one I say to put down an argument against democratic theory which could not be found within these few pages or to suggest a limitation of it which was so had not touched on if proof were needed of what particular merits his pamphlet displayed it would be sufficient to point out that in a time when the problem represented by religion was least comprehended when the practice of religion was at its lowest and when the meaning almost of religion had left men's minds russo was capable of writing his final chapter that great religious revival of the 19th century should have proved russo's view of religion in the state to be insufficient is in no way remarkable for when russo wrote that revival was undreamt of what is remarkable is that he should have allowed as he did for the religious sentiment and above all that he should have seen how impossible it is for a selection of christian dogma to be accepted as a civic religion it is further amazing that at such a time a man could be found who should appreciate that for the state to have unity it must possess a religion and russo's attempt to define that minimum or substratum of religion without which unity could not exist in the state unfortunately became the commonplace of the politicians and particularly of the english politicians who succeeded him who might not think for instance that he was reading though better expressed of course and a politician would put it some liberal politician at west minster if he were to come on such phrases as these with regard to what should be taught in the schools of the country quote the doctrines taught by the state should be simple few and number expressed with precision and without explanation or commentary the existence of a powerful god beneficent providential and good the future life the happiness of the good and the punishment of evil the sanctity of the agreements which bind society together and of laws while as for negative doctrines one is sufficient and that one is the wickedness of intolerance end quote russo's hundred pages are the direct source of the theory of the modern state their lucidity and unmatched economy of diction their rigid analysis their epigrammatic judgment and wisdom these are the reservoirs from whence modern democracy has flowed what are now proved to be the errors of democracy are errors against which the contract social warned men the moral apology of democracy is the moral apology written by russo and if in this one point of religion he struck a more confused and a less determined note than in the rest it must be remembered that in his time no other man understood what part religion played in human affairs for in his days the few who studied religion and observed it could not connect it in any way with the political nature of man and of those who counted in the intellect of europe by far the greater number thought political problems better solved if religion which they had lost were treated as negligible they were wrong and russo in his generalities upon the soul was insufficient both were beneath the height of a final theory of man but russo came much nearer to comprehension even in this point of religion than did any of his contemporaries the end of section four the end of chapter two section five the french revolution this is a libravox recording all libravox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org the french revolution by heler bellach section five chapter three characters of the revolution king louis the 16th as might be expected the character of louis the 16th has suffered more distortion at the hands of historians than has any other of the revolutionary figures and this because he combined with that personal character of his a certain office to which were traditionally attached certain points of view and methods of action which the historian takes for granted when he deals with the character of the man as anyone thinking of a judge of some standing upon the english bench cannot but believe that he is possessed of some learning or some gravity etc as anyone hearing of a famous soldier cannot but believe that he has certain qualities associated with the business of soldiering so historians tend to confuse the personality and the character of louis the 16th with that of his office they either by contrast exaggerate his unkingly defects or by sympathy exaggerate his kingly opposition to reform the student will do well to avoid this error and its source and to think of louis as of a man who had been casually introduced almost without preparation into the office which he held in other words the student will do well in his reading of the revolution to consider louis the 16th simply as a man and his character as a private character for this last of the long unbroken line of the capetians possessed a character essentially individual it was of a type which no matter what accidents of fortune might have fallen upon its possessor would have remained the same nor was ever a man possessed of high office whom high office had less molded men thus impervious to their environment are commonly so from two causes either from an intense and vivid personal initiative which may border upon madness or from something thick and heavy in their moral accruement which defends against external action the internal personal temperament the latter was the case with louis he was very slow of thought and very slow of decision his physical movements were slow the movement of his eyes was notably slow he had a way of falling asleep under the effort of fatigue at the most incongruous moments the things that amused him were of the largest and most superficial kind horse play now and then a little touched with eccentricity and very plain but unexpected jokes one may express him from one aspect by saying that he was one of those men whom you could never by any chance have hoped to convince of anything the few things which he accepted he accepted quite simply and the process of reasoning in the mouth of any who approached him was always too rapid for him to follow but it must not be imagined on this account that the moral integument so described was wrapped about a void on the contrary it includes the very definite character louis possessed the number of intimate convictions upon which he was not to be shaken he was profoundly convinced of the existence and value of certain corporate tradition in the organism which he ruled the french nation he was a national in this he differed from many a pedant many a courtier many an ecclesiastic and many a woman about him especially his wife he was again possessed of all the elements of the catholic faith it was indeed a singular thing for a man of his position at such a time to hold intimately to religion but louis held to it he confessed he communicated he attended mass he performed his ordinary devotions not by way of tradition or political duty or state function to which religious performance was now reduced in the vast majority of his wealthy contemporaries but as an individual for whom these things had a personal value had he with precisely the same interior spirit woken in his bed some morning to find himself a country squire and to discover that all his past kingship had been a dream of the night he would have continued the practice of his religion as before now this is a sufficiently remarkable point for the country squire the noble the lawyer the university professor of the generation immediately preceding the revolution had as a rule no conception of the catholic church with them the faith was dead save in the case of a very few who made it if one may say so without disrespect amenia and in their exaggerations were themselves the proofs of the depth of decay into which the church of gall had fallen louis the 16th was possessed then of religion it appeared in many of his acts in his hesitation to a point not a few of his many atheist bishops of the time in his real agony of responsibility upon the civil constitution of the clergy and in nothing more than a peculiar sobriety and solid ritual whereby he prepared for a tragic sudden and ignominious death it is next to be observed that though he was a man not yet in middle age and though he was quite devoid of ardor in any form he had from the first matured a great basis of courage it is well to admit that this quality in him was connected with those slow processes of thought and action which hampered him but it is not to be explained by them no man yet has become brave through mere stupidity it was not only the accidents of the revolution that provided this quality in him his physical habits proved it long before he was a resolute and capable rider of the horse an aptitude in that exercise is impossible to the coward again in those byproducts of courage which are apparent even where no physical danger threatens he was conspicuous he had no hesitation in facing a number of men and he had an aptitude in a mechanical trade a business by no means unconnected with virility now in mentioning his virility it is of prime importance for the student to remember though the matter can be touched upon but lightly that louis in this department of physical life suffered from a mechanical impediment which gravely distorted the first years of his marriage which undoubtedly wounded his self-respect and which was perhaps the only thing that caused him permanent anxiety he was cured by medical aid in the summer of the year 1777 but he was already three years a king and seven years a husband before that relief came to him the tragedy affected his whole life and I repeat must never be forgotten when one considers either him or Marie Antoinette in their intimate character and in their effect as actors in the great drama for the rest the character of louis betrayed certain ineptitudes the word ineptitude is far more accurate in this connection than the word weaknesses which ineptitudes were particularly fatal for the military office which he held and for the belligerent crisis which he had to me few men are possessed of the eye the subtle sympathy the very rapid power of decision and the comprehension of human contrasts and differences which build up the apt leader of an armed force great or small most men are mediocre in the combination of these qualities but louis was quite exceptionally hopeless where they were concerned he could never have seen the simplest position nor have appreciated the military aspects of any character or of any body of men he could ride but he could not ride at the head of a column he was not merely bad at this trade he was null drafted as a private into a conscript army he would never have been entrusted with the duties of a corporal he would have been impossible as a sergeant and possessed of commissioned rank ridicule would have compelled him to take his discharge this lack did not only or chiefly betray itself in his inability to meet personally the armed crisis of a revolution it was not only or chiefly apparent in his complete breakdown during the assault upon the palace in the 10th of august it was also and much more the disastrous cause of his inability to oversee or even to choose military advisors those who propose in the early part of the revolution to check the mob in paris are excellent commanders but louis does not know it those who succeed each other at the ministry of war or at the head of the armies during the active part of the revolution are various in the extreme but they all seem one to him between a fop like nirbone and a subtle trained cavalryman like du moré louis made no distinction the military qualities of lafayette which were not to be despised meant no more to him than does music good or bad to a deaf man from the beginning to the end of the movement the whole of the military problem escaped him another hole in his character which was of prime importance at such a time was his inability to grasp in a clear vision any general social problem maps he could well comprehend and he could well retain statistics but the landscape as it were of the revolution his protubant and lethargic eyes completely missed he was quite unable to see where lay danger and where support in what large masses such and such forces were grouped and the directions in which they were advancing or upon which they must retreat in this matter he was as will be seen in a moment the very opposite of mirrobo and it was on account of this weakness or rather this form of nullity that all mirrobo's vision was wasted upon louis finally he had no working comprehension of europe he did not even exaggerate the powers of the allies in the later phases of the revolution when they were marching upon France he did not either underestimate or overestimate the policy and naval force of great britain the military resources of his own subjects the probable sympathies of the netherlands anti austrian but catholic the decay of spain the division and impotence of the italian peninsula louis saw nothing of all these things one may conclude the picture for the purposes of such a short study as this by saying that only one coincidence could have led him through the labyrinth of the time with success that coincidence would have been the presence at his side of a friend fully trusted from childhood loved as religious as himself and yet possessing precisely those qualities which he himself lacked had louis found a hand such a lieutenant the qualities i have mentioned would have been a sort of keel and ballast which would have secured the monarchy for he was not weak he was not impulsive he was not even foolish he was only wretchedly alone in his incapacities certainly such a nature could trust and rely upon no one who was not of this intimate kind and he possessed no such intimate let alone an intimate who could command the qualities i have suggested being what he was his character is among the half dozen which determined the revolution to take the course which it did the end of section five section six the french revolution this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org the french revolution by hill air bellock section six chapter three continued the queen marie antonette presents to history a character which it is of the highest interest to regard as a whole it is the business of her biographers to consider that character as a whole but in her connection with the revolution there is but one aspect of it which is of importance and that is the attitude which such a character was bound to take towards the french nation in the midst of which the queen found herself it is the solution of the whole problem which the queen's action sets before us to apprehend the gulf that separated her not only from the french temperament but from a comprehension of all french society had she been a woman lacking in energy or in decision this alien character in her would have been a small matter and her ignorance of the french in every form of their activity or rather her inability to comprehend them would have been but a private failing productive only of certain local and immediate consequences and not in any way determining the great lines of the revolutionary movement as it was her energy was not only abundant but steadfast it grew more secure in its action as it increased with her years and the initiative which gave that energy its course never vacillated but was always direct she knew her own mind and she attempted often with a partial success to realize her convictions there was no character in touch with the executive during the first years of the revolution comparable to hers for fixity of purpose and definition of you it was due to this energy and singleness of aim that her misunderstanding of the material with which she had the deal was of such fatal importance it was she who chose before the outbreak of the revolution the succession of those ministers both liberal and reactionary whose unwise plans upon either side precipitated violence it was she who called and then revoked and later recalled to office the wealthy and overestimated necker she who substituted for him and then so inappropriately threw over kelon the most national of the precursors of the revolution and ever after her most bitter enemy it was she who advised the more particularly irritating details of resistance after the meeting of the first revolutionary parliament it was she who presided over and helped to warp the plans for the flight of the royal family it was she who after this flight had failed framed a definite scheme for the coercion of the french people by the governments of europe it was she who betrayed the foreign chanceries the french plan of campaign when war had become inevitable finally it was she who inspired the declaration of brunswick which accompanied the invasion of french territory and she was in particular the author of the famous threat therein contained to give over paris to military execution and to hold all the popular authorities responsible with their lives for the restoration of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs as research proceeds the capital effect of this woman's continual and decided interference will be more and more apparent to historians now maria entoinette's conception of mankind in general was a conception that you will find prevalent in such societies as that domestic and warm center which had nourished her childhood the romantic affection of a few equals the personal loyalty of a handful of personal servants the vague histrionic content which permeates the poor at the side of great equipages and rich accouterments the cheers of a crowd when such symbols accompanying monarchy are displayed in the streets all these were from maria entoinette the fundamental political feelings of mankind an absence of them she regarded with bewilderment an active opposition to them she hated as something at once incomprehensible and positively evil there was in all this illusion of course a great element of what the english called middle class and the french bourgeois to be quite ignorant of what servitors will say of their masters behind their backs not to appreciate that heroic devotion is the faculty of a few never to have imagined the discontents of men in general and the creative desire for self-expression which inspires men when they act politically not to know that men as a whole and particularly the french people are not deceived by the accidents of wealth nor attach any real inferiority to poverty to despise the common will of numbers or to doubt its existence to see society established in a hierarchy not of office but of leisure all this may seem to the democrat a very unnatural and despicable mood but it was not despicable still less unnatural in the case of maria entoinette it was the only experience and the only conception of society which had ever been given her she had always believed when she gazed upon a mass of the populace that the difference between the crowd and herself was a moral reality the contrast in external habits between the wealthy the middle class and the poor a contrast ultimately produced by differences in the opportunity and leisure which wealth affords she thought to be fundamental just as children and certain domestics pet animals regard such economic accidents in society as something real which differentiates men so did she but she happened to nourish this illusion in the midst of the people and within a day's walk of a capital where the misconception had less hold than in any other district of europe of the traits peculiar to the french she knew nothing or to put it more strongly she could not believe that they really existed the extremes of cruelty into which this people could fall were inconceivable to her as were also the extremes of courage to which they can rise under the same excitement as arouse them to an excess of hatred but that character in the french which she most utterly failed to foresee or to comprehend was their power of corporate organization that a multitude could instruct and order themselves for a common purpose rapidly acquire and nominate the officers who should bring that purpose to fruition and in general pass in one moment from a mere multitude to an incipient army that was a faculty which the french had always had and have to a peculiar degree and which she likes so many of our own contemporaries and especially those of german blood could not believe to be real this faculty in the french when it took action and was apparent in the physical struggles of the revolution seemed to her to the very end a sort of nightmare something which by all the laws of reality ought not to be happening but somehow or other was happening in a manner evilly miraculous it was her ignorance upon this main point of all that caused her to rely so continually upon the use of regular forces and of those forces in insufficient numbers she could not but believe that if you train soldiery were necessarily the masters of great civilian bodies their uniforms were a powerful argument with her and mere civilian bodies however numerous were always in her conception a dust of disparate and inchoate community she believed there was nothing to attack or resist in popular numbers but the opinion the fear or the cupidity of the individual in this era of judgment concerning the french people she was not peculiar it is an error repeated over and over again by foreigners and even by some native commentators when they seek to account for some national movement of the Gauls the unlearning of it is the first lesson which those who would either administrate or resist the french should learn in the matter of religion which the reader may see in these pages to be of such moment in the revolutionary story the queen was originally far more indifferent than her husband though she observed a certain measure of personal practice it was not until her heavy misfortunes came upon her that any degree of personal devotion appeared in her daily life though it must be admitted that by a sort of premonition of disaster she turned to religion in the months immediately preceding the outbreak of the reform it remains to describe the personal effect she had upon those who were in her immediate presence most of the french aristocracy she repelled the same misfortune which made her unable to understand the french temperament as a whole divorced her from that particular corner of it which took the shape of french aristocratic tradition she did not understand its stiffness its exactitude its brilliancy or its hardness and she heartily disliked all four on this account she produced in the great families of her court and especially upon the women of them an effect of vulgarity had she survived and had her misfortunes not been so tragic in intensity the legend she would have left in french society would certainly have been one of offhanded carelessness self-indulgence and lack of dignity which have for the french of that rank the savor of a loud voice a bad accent and an insufficient usage in the rules of daily conduct leave upon what is left of the corresponding rank in england today she was on the other hand easily deceived by the flattery of place-seekers and the great power which she wielded in politics just before the revolution broke out made her as it were a sort of butt of the politicians they haunted her presence they depended upon her patronage and at the same time they secretly ridiculed her her carriage which was designed to impress onlookers and did have that effect upon most foreigners seemed to most of the french observers of a rank which permitted them to approach her familiarly somewhat theatrical and sometimes actually absurd the earnestness which she displayed in several lines of conduct and notably in her determined animosity to certain characters as that of Lafayette for instance was of an open and violent sort which seemed for them merely brutal and unintelligent her luxury moreover was noticed by the refined world of Versailles to be hardly ever of her own choosing but nearly always practiced in imitation of others in connection with that trait of luxury the reader must appreciate at the outset that it was grievously exaggerated by her contemporaries and has been still more exaggerated by posterity she was not a very frivolous still less a dissipated woman she was woefully loose in tongue but she was certainly virtuous she gambled but as the times went and the supposed unlimited fortune of the crown her gambling was not often excessive her expenditure upon jewelry and dress would be thought most moderate today in the case of any lady of our wealthier families on the other hand her whims were continual and as continually changing especially in the earlier part of her life since that surrounding world of the court which she misunderstood and which had no sympathy with her was ready to find some handle against her that handle of dissipation was the easiest for them to seize but the accusation was not a just one had fortune made her the wife of a poor man in a lower class of society Marie Antoinette would have been a capable housewife her abundant energy would have found a proper channel and she was in no way by nature extravagant she had a few very passionate somewhat too sentimental friendships some of which were returned others of which their objects exploited to their own advantage the two most famous were her friendship for the princess d'lambel and for madame d'pognac these moved her not infrequently to unwise acts of patronage where she were immediately seized by the popular voice and turned against her they were among the few weaknesses apparent in her general temper they were certainly ill balance and ill judged she indulged also in a number of small and unimportant flirtations which might almost be called the routine of her rank and world she had but one great affection in her life for the other sex and it was most ardently returned its object was the swedish noble of her own age the very opposite of the French in his temper romantically chivalrous on practical in the extreme gentle intensely reserved his name count axel d'fersen the affair remained pure but she loved him with her whole heart and in the last months of her tragedy this emotion must be regarded as the chief concern of her soul they saw each other but very rarely often they were separated for years it was this perhaps which lent both glamour and fidelity to the strange romance the end of section six section seven the french revolution this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libra vox.org the french revolution by hill air bellach section seven chapter three continued mirabeau mirabeau the chief of the practical man of the revolution as the english language would render the most salient point in their political attitude needs a very particular examination his influence upon the early part of the revolution was so considerable the effect of his death was so determinant and final the speculation as to what might have happened had he survived is so fruitful so entertaining and so common and the positive effect of his attitude upon the development of the revolution after his death was so wide that to misunderstand mirabeau is in a large measure to misunderstand the whole movement and mirabeau has unfortunately been ill or superficially understood by many among now three generations of historians for a comprehension of this character is not a matter for research nor for accumulated historic detail but rather a task for sympathy mirabeau was essentially an artist with the powers and the frailties which we properly associate with that term that is strong emotion appealed to him both internally and externally he loved to enjoy it himself he loved to create it in others he studied therefore and was a master of the material by which such emotion may be created he himself yielded to strong emotion and sought it where it might be found it is foolish alike to belittle and to exaggerate this type of temperament upon it or upon its admixture with other qualities is based the music the plastic art and in a large measure the permanent literature of the world this aptitude for the enjoyment and for the creation in others of emotion close intellectual work in a manner which makes it permanent this is what we mean when we say that style is necessary to a book that a great civilization may partly be judged by its architecture that as play dough says music may be moral or immoral and so forth the artist though he is not at the root of human affairs is a necessary and proper ally in their development when i say that mirabeau was an artist i mean that wherever his energies might have found play he would have their desire to enjoy and to create enjoyment through some definite medium this medium was in part literary but much more largely oral expression to be a tribune that is the voice of great numbers to persuade ney to please by his very accents and the very rhythm of his sentences these things occupied the man but he also brought into his art that without which no great art can exist mere intellect he believed in the main principles at least which underlay the revolutionary movement he understood them and was prepared to propagate them but his power over men was not due to this conviction his power over men was wholly that of the artist and had he by some accident been engaged in maintaining the attack against democracy he would have been nearly as famous as he became under the title of its defender we must then always consider mirabeau as an orator though as an orator endowed with the fine and clear intelligence and with no small measure of reasoned faith much else remains to be said of him he was a gentleman that is he both enjoyed and suffered the consequences which attached to her military wealth and to the atmosphere that surrounds its expenditure on this account he being personally insufficiently provided with wealth he was forever in debt and regarded the sums necessary to his station in life into his large opportunities as things do to him so to speak from society we are right when we may say he took bribes but wrong if we imagine that those bribes bound him as they would bind a man meaner in character or less lucky in his birth he stooped as gentleman will to all manner of low intrigues to obtain the necessary and the wherewith that is money for his role but there was a driving power behind him bound up with his whole character which made it impossible for any such sums to control his diction or to make of such a man a mere advocate he was never that dirtiest a political phenomena the party man he would never have been had he been born a hundred years later and thrust into the nastiness of modern parliamentary life a parliamentary hand mirabeau had behind him a certain personal history which we must read in connection with his temperament he had traveled widely he knew Englishmen and Germans of the wealthier classes well the populace he knew ill even in his own country abroad he knew it not at all he had suffered from his father's dislike of him from the consequences of his own unbridled passions also not a little from mere accidental misfortune capable of prolonged and faithful attachment to some woman the opportunity for that attachment had never been afforded him until the last few months before his death capable of paying loyal and industrious service to some political system no political system had chosen him for its servant it is a fruitful matter of speculation to consider what he might have done for the French monarchy had fate put him early at court and given him some voice in the affairs of the French executive before the revolution broke out as it was the revolution provided him with his opportunity merely because it broke down old barriers and conventions and was destructive of the framework of the state in which he lived he was compelled to enter the revolution as something of a destroyer for by no other avenue could he be given his chance but by nature he detested destruction i mean since this phrase is somewhat vague he detested that spirit which will disendow a nation of certain prominent institutions serving definite ends without a clear scheme of how those institutions should be replaced by others to serve similar ends it was on this account that he was most genuinely and sincerely a defender of the monarchy a prominent institution serving the definite ends of national unity and the repression of tendencies to oligarchy in the state maribo had none of the revolutionary vision in mind he was prematurely aged for his mind had worked very rapidly over a very varied field of experiences the pure doctrine of democracy which was a religion to many of his contemporaries with all the consequences of a religion he had never thought of accepting but certain consequences of the proposed reform strongly appealed to him he loved to be rid of meaningless and dead barriers privileges which no longer corresponded to real social differences old traditions in the management of trade which no longer corresponded to the economic circumstances of his time and this is the pivotal point the fossils of an old religious creed which like nearly all his rank he simply took for granted to be dead for maribo was utterly divorced from the catholic church much has been said and will be said in these pages concerning the religious quarrel which though men hardly knew it at the time cut right across the revolutionary effort and was destined to form the lasting line of cleavage in french life there will be repeated again and again what has already been written that a reconciliation between a catholic church and the reconstruction of democracy was though men did not know it the chief temporal business of the time and the reader of these pages will be made well acquainted in them with the degradation to which religion had fallen among this cultivated of that generation but in the case of maribo this absence of religion must be particularly insisted upon it would no more have occurred to maribo that the catholic faith had a future then it could occur to us let us say an english politician of 30 years ago that the irish might become a wealthy community or that an english government might within its own lifetime find itself embarrassed for money i use this parallel for the sake of strengthening my contention but it is indeed a weak parallel no contemporary parallel in our strange and rapidly changing times corresponds to the fixed certitude which permeated the whole of the end of the 18th century that the catholic faith was dead maribo had perhaps never engaged in his life in intimate conversations a single man who took the catholic sacrament seriously or suffered a moment's anxiety upon the tenants of the creed he knew indeed that certain women and a much smaller number of insignificant men wrapped themselves up in old practices of an odd superstitious kind he knew that great dull areas of ignorant peasantry in proportion to their poverty and isolation repeated by rote the old formula of the faith but of the faith as a living thing he could have no conception he saw on the one hand a clerical institution economic and character providing places and revenues for men of his own rank he met those men and never discover them to have any religion at all he saw on the other hand a proposed society in which such a fossil unjust and meaningless must relinquish its grip upon those large revenues but the faith as the social force as the thing able to revive he could have no conception it would have seemed to him a mere folly to suggest that future might contain the possibility of such a resurrection the dissolution of the religious orders which was largely his work the civil constitution of the clergy which he presided over were to him the most natural acts in the world they were the mere sweeping away of a quantity of inorganic stuff which numbered the modern state he felt of them as we might feel of the purchase of waste spaces in our cities or the confiscation of some bad landlords property in them the church served no kind of purpose not one who counted believed in it it was defended only by people who enjoyed large revenues from the survival of what had once been but was now no longer a living social function in everything of the revolution which he understood mirabeau was upon the side of caution he was not oblivious to the conception of popular government he was not even mistrustful of it but he could not conceive of it save as acting through the established strength of the wealthier classes of military power he judged very largely through Prussian eyes and in long and enthusiastic passages he described the Prussian army as invincible had he lived to see the military enthusiasm of the republicans he would utterly have distrusted it he favored in his heart an aristocratic machinery of society though not an aristocratic theory of the state he was quite determined to preserve as a living but diminished national organ the traditional monarchy of France he was curious upon a number of details which were present and close to his eyes methods of voting constitutional checks commercial codes and the rest of it the little equilibriums of diplomacy interested him also and the watching of men immediately under his eye in the parliament it was in the parliament that his whole activity lay it was there that he began to guide the revolution it was his absence from the parliament after his death that the revolution most feels in the summer of 1791 this very brief sketch does not present mirabeau to the reader he can only be properly presented in his speeches and in the more rhetorical of his documents it is probable as time proceeds that his reputation in this department will grow his constitutional ideas based as they were upon foreign institutions and especially upon the english of that time were not applicable to his own people and are now nearly forgotten he was wrong upon english politics as he was wrong upon the german armies but he had art over men and his personality endures and increases with time the end of section seven section eight the french revolution this is a libra vox recording all libra vox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit libravox.org the french revolution by hill air bellock section eight chapter three continued lafayette the character of lafayette has suffered chiefly from his own aloofness towards contemporaries on the one hand and from his rigid adherents to principle upon the other both these causes are clearly connected the same quality in him which made him so tenacious of principle made him contentious of the run of man about him fundamentally he was nearer the extreme republicans than any other class from the very fact of his possessing a clear political creed and a determination to follow it out to its logical consequence but there was no chance of his comprehending the concrete side of the movement or the men engaged upon it for his great wealth inherited in very early life had cut him off from experience his moral fault was undoubtedly ambition it was an ambition which worked in the void as it were and never measured itself with other men's capacities or opportunities he made no plans for advancement not because he would have despised the use of intrigue and reason but because he was incapable of working it he was exceedingly attached to popularity when it came he thought it is due unpopularity in its turn seemed to him a proof of the vileness of those who despised him he made himself too much the measure of his world undoubtedly a very great part of the molding of his character proceeds from his experience in the united states of america he was then at the most impressionable and formative period of human life little more than a boy or at least just entering early manhood he had just married he had just come into the administration of his vast fortune at such a moment he took part in the victorious rebellion of the english colonies and it may be imagined how powerful was the effect of this youthful vision upon the whole of the man's future life because there was no proletariat in the colonies he never saw or comprehended the dispossessed classes of paris for that matter he never saw or comprehended the french peasantry upon his own lands because a chance and volunteer soldiery had under the peculiar conditions of the half populated atlantic seaboard in conjunction with the french fleet and with the aid of french money and arms got the better of the small and heterogeneous forces of george the third he believed that a military nation like the french in the midst of powerful enemies could make something of an amateur civic force because a certain type of ease in social relations was the ideal of many perhaps of most of those whom he had served in america he confused so simple and mundane and ideal with the fierce crusading blast and the sacred passion for equality which was stirring his own nation when his opportunity for leadership came it may be said of lafayette with justice that he never upon a single occasion did the right thing it may also be said with justice that he never did politically any major thing for which his own conscience would later reproach him it is not noticeable that the queen held him in particular odium he had been a wealthy young noble about the court the friend of all her women friends and his sympathy with the revolutionary movement at its inception therefore seemed to her nothing better than treason there was also undoubtedly something in his manner which grievously repelled her that it was self-sufficient we cannot doubt that it was so often futile and therefore exasperating to women events are sufficient to show but maria entoinette's violent personal antagonism towards lafayette was not common though several ardent spirits dantons for instance shared it the mass of those who came across lafayette felt in connection with him a certain irritation or a certain contempt or a certain rather small and distant respect he inspired no enthousiasms and when he timidly attempted a rebellion against the new government after the fall of the monarchy no one would sacrifice himself or follow him it may be affirmed of lafayette that if he had not existed the revolution would have pursued much the same course as it did with this exception that there would not have been formed a definitely middle class armed guard to provoke friction in paris the national guard would have been more open to all ranks in religion the man was anodyne catholic of course by baptism but distinctly Protestant in morals and in general tone in dogma until the end of his life free thinking of course like all his contemporaries he was personally courageous but foolishly despised the duel one anecdote out of many will help to fix his nature in the mind of the reader maribo casting about as usual for aid in his indebtedness sent urgently to him as to a fellow noble a fellow politician and a fellow supporter of the crown begging alone of two thousand pounds lafayette accorded him one thousand du moray du moray's presents a character particularly difficult for the modern englishman to comprehend so remote his circumstance and fundamentals from those of our time of good birth but born in a generation when social differences had become a jest for intelligent and active men and he was intelligent and active courageous with a good knowledge of his trade of soldiering of rapid decision and excellent judgment where troops or terrain were concerned he was all at sea in the comprehension of men and he bore no loyalty to the state it is this last feature which will particularly surprise the english reader for it is the singular and permanent advantage of oligarchic communities such as the british that they retain under any stress and show throughout the whole commonwealth the sense of the state to betray the state to act against its interests to be imperfectly conscious of its existence are crimes or weaknesses unknown to the citizens of an oligarchy and a citizen of this country cannot easily conceive of them today in democracies and despotisms on the other hand to forget one's duty to the state to be almost oblivious of its corporate existence is a common weakness there is here a compensation and by just so much as despotism and democracy permit rapid effective and all compelling action on the part of the state by just so much as they permit sudden and sometimes miraculous enthusiasms which save or which confirm a state by that also do they lack the quiet and persistent consciousness of the state which oligarchy fosters and determines du marais excellent as a general can only be appreciated by those who have looked closely into the constitution of the forces which he was to command and to the adversaries with whom he had to deal it is the prime quality of a great commander that his mind stands ready for any change in circumstances or in the material to his hand and even when we have allowed for elements of luck which is so considerable in military affairs we must not forget that du marais saved without disaster the wretched and disorganized bands in co-et and largely mutinous as to their old units worthless and amateur as to their new which had to meet in and behind the argon the model army of prussia we must not forget that his plan for the invasion of the low countries was a just insensible one nor with what skill after the inevitable defeat and retreat of the spring of 1793 he saved his command intact as a subordinate to an armed executive to the government of polian for instance the man would have been priceless nay had circumstances permitted him to retain supreme command of civil as of military power he would have made no bad dictator his mere technical skill was so considerable as to make the large sums paid to him by the english government seem a good bargain even at our distance of time and his plans for the defense of england and for the attack of napoleon are approved for the value at which he was estimated but du marais was quite unable to act under the special circumstances in which he happened to be placed at the moment of his treason amir ambition had carried him from intrigue to intrigue among the politicians he despised them as an active and capable soldier was compelled to despise them he was too old to share any of their enthousiasms even had his temperament permitted him to entertain any vision political or religious he certainly never felt at least moral bond attaching to him to what was in his eyes the chance anarchy of the last six months of the french government under which he served and if he is to be branded with the title of trader then we must brand with the same title all that multitude of varied men who escaped from the country in the emigration who left it in disgust or even who remained in france but disparate of french fortunes in the turmoil of 1793 it is perhaps a worthy excuse for du marais's failure to point out that he also was one of those whom the court might have used had it known how to use men but the court had no such knowledge danton the character of danton has more widely impressed the world than of any other revolutionary leader because it contained elements permanently human independent of the democratic theory of the time and necessary neither to the support of that theory nor to the criticism of it the character of danton appeals to that sense in man which is interested in action and which in the field of letters takes the form of drama his vigor his personal strength of mind and body the individuality of his outline arrest equally the man who loves the revolution and the man who hates it and the man who is quite indifferent to its success or failure it is on this very account that historians especially foreign historians have tended to misinterpret the man thus carlyle who has great intuition in the matter yet makes him out farmer-like which he certainly was not michelé fascinated by his energy presents him as something uncouth and in general those who would describe danton stand at a distance as it were where his loud voice and forcible gesture may best be appreciated but a man to be seen truly must be seen in intimacy danton was essentially a compound of two powerful characters in man he was emative or constructive and at the same time not only possessed but like to exercise lucidity of thought the combination is among the strongest of all those that go to build up human personalities that which was emative and constructive in him his virility if you will brought him into close touch with reality he knew and loved his own country for instance and infinitely preferred its happy survival to the full development of any political theory he also knew and loved his fellow countrymen in detail and as persons he knew what made a frenchman weak and what made him strong the vein of jugonetry though he did not know it for what it was he disliked in his compatriots on the other hand the salt and freshness of the french was native to him and he delighted in it the freedom of their expression the noise of their rhetoric and the military subsoil of them were things to all of which he immediately responded he understood their sort of laughter nor was he shocked as a man less national would have been at their peculiar national vices and in his special their latches into rage it is this which must account for what all impartial judgment most blames in him which is his indifference to the cruelties his absorbed interest in foreign and military affairs at the moment of the massacres of september this touch with reality made him understand in some fashion though only from without the nature of the germans the foolish mania of their rulers for mere territorial expansion unaccompanied by persuasion or the spread of their ideas he comprehended the vast superiority of their armies over the disorganized forces of the french in 1792 he clearly seized hence on the one hand his grasp of their foreign policy and on the other his able negotiation of the retreat after balmy he also understood however and more profoundly the rapid self-organization of which his own countrymen were capable and it was upon this knowledge that his determination to risk the continuance of the war reposed it should be remarked that both in his military and in his quasi-military action he was himself endowed in a singular degree with that power of immediate decision which is characteristic of his nation his lucidity of thought permitted him to foresee the consequences of many a revolutionary decision and at the same time inclined him to a strong sympathy with the democratic creed with the doctrine of equality and especially with the remolding of the national institutions particularly his own profession of the law upon simple lines he was undoubtedly a sincere and convinced revolutionary and one whose doctrine more permeated him than did that of many of his contemporaries their less than solid minds he was not on that account necessarily republican had some accident called his genius into play earlier in the development of the struggle he might well like marible with whom he presents so curious a parallel have thought it better for the country to save the monarchy it must always be remembered that he was a man of wide culture and one who had achieved an early and satisfactory professional success he was earning a sound income at the moment of his youthful marriage he read english largely and could speak it his dress was not inexpensive and though somewhat disordered as often is with the men of intense energy and constant gesture it never gave an impression of carelessness or disarray he had many and indifferent intellectual interests and was capable thereof of intelligent application in several fields he appreciated the rapid growth of physical science and at the same time the complexity of the old social conditions too widely different from contemporary truths to religion he was of course like all men of that time utterly indifferent but unlike many of them he sees the precise proportion of its remaining effect upon certain districts and certain sections of the countryside there has been a tendency laterally to exaggerate the part which freemasonry played in the launching of him he was indeed a member of a masonic lodge as were for that matter all the men conspicuous or obscure democratic or utterly reactionary who appeared upon the revolutionary stage probably the king certainly all the aristocrats like the father of madame deal and bell and the whole host of the middle class from men like bailey to men like condescent but it is reading history backwards and imagining the features of our own time to have been present a century ago to make of masonry the determining element in his career danton failed and died from two combined causes first his health gave way secondly he uprooted his sanity and civilian sense into the heated fury and calculated martial law of the second year of the republic to both that fury and that calculation he was an obstacle his opposition to the terror lost him the support of the enthusiasts but it was the interference which such a judgment made in the plans of the soldiers and notably of carnaught that determined his condemnation and death he also like marible will undoubtedly increases the years proceed and if only as a representative of the national temper become more and more the typical figure of the revolution in action the end of section eight