Every year, when I descend from my chair, at the close of my academic labours, when I see the crowd disperse—another generation that I shall behold no more—my mind is lost in inward contemplation.
Summer comes on; the town is less peopled, the streets are less noisy, the pavement grows more sonorous around my Pantheon. Its large black and white slabs resound beneath my feet.
I commune with my own mind. I interrogate myself as to my teaching, my history, and its all-powerful interpreter,--the spirit of the Revolution.
It possesses a knowledge
of which others are ignorant. It contains the secret of all bygone times.
In it alone France became conscious of herself. When, in a moment of
weakness, we may appear forgetful of our own worth, it is to this point
that we should recur in order to seek and recover ourselves again. Here,
the inextinguishable spark, the profound mystery of life, is ever glowing
within us.
The Revolution lives in ourselves,--in our souls; it has no outward
monument. Living spirit of France, where shall I seize thee, but within
myself? The governments that have succeeded each other, hostile
in all other respects, appear at least agreed in this, to resuscitate,
to awaken remote and departed ages. But thee they would have wished
to bury? Yet why? Thou, thou alone dost live.
Thou livest! I feel this truth perpetually impressed upon me at the
present period of the year, when my teaching is suspended,-when labour
grows fatiguing, and the season becomes oppressive. Then I wander to
the Champ de Mars, I sit me down on the parched grass, and inhale the
strong breeze that is wafted across the arid plain.
The Champ de Mars! This is the only monument that the Revolution has left. The Empire has its Column, and engrosses almost exclusively the Arch of Triumph; royalty has its Louvre, its Hospital of Invalids; the feudal church of the twelfth century is still enthroned at Notre Dame: nay, the very Romans have their Imperial Ruins, the Thermae of the Caesars!
And the Revolution has for her monument: empty space.
Her monument is
this sandy plain, flat as Arabia. A tumulus on either hand, resembling
those which Gaul was accustomed to erect, obscure and equivocal testimonial
to her heroes' fame. The Hero! do you mean him who built the Jena Bridge? No, there is one here greater even than he, more powerful and
more immortal, who fills this immensity. "What God? We know
not. But here a God doth dwell."
Yes, though a forgetful generation dares to select this spot for the
theatre of its vain amusements, borrowed from a foreign land, though
the English race-horse may gallop insolently over the plain, a mighty
breath yet traverses it, such as you nowhere else perceive; a soul,
and a spirit omnipotent. And though that plain be arid, and the grass
be withered, it will, one day, renew its verdure. For in that soil is
profoundly mingled the fruitful sweat of their brows who, on a sacred
day, piled up those hills,-that day when, aroused by the cannon of the
Bastille, France from the North and France from the South came forward
and embraced; that day when three million heroes in arms rose with the
unanimity of one man, and decreed eternal peace.
Alas! poor Revolution.
How confidingly on thy first day didst thou invite the world to love
and peace. "0 my enemies," didst thou exclaim, "there
are no longer any enemies!" Thou didst stretch forth thy hand to
all, and offer them thy cup to drink to the peace of nations—but they
would not.
And even when they advanced to inflict a treacherous wound, the sword
drawn by France was the sword of peace.
It was to deliver the nations, and give them true peace—Liberty—that
she struck the tyrants. Dante asserts Eternal Love to be the founder
of the gates of hell. And thus the Revolution wrote Peace upon
her flag of war.
Her heroes, her
invincible warriors, were the most pacific of human beings. Hoche, Marceau,
Desaix, and Kléber, are deplored by friends and foes, as the
champions of peace; they are mourned by the Nile, and by the Rhine,
nay, by war itself—by the inflexible Vendée.
France had so completely identified herself with this thought, that
she did her utmost to restrain herself from achieving conquests. Every
nation needing the same blessing—liberty—and pursuing the same right,
whence could war possibly arise? Could the Revolution, which, in its
principle, was but the triumph of right, the resurrection of justice,
the tardy reaction of thought against brute force; could it, without
provocation, have recourse to violence?
This utterly pacific,
benevolent, loving character of the Revolution seems today a paradox: so
unknown is its origin, so misunderstood its nature, and so obscured
its tradition, in so short a time! The violent, terrible efforts which
it was obliged to make, in order not to perish in a struggle with the
conspiring world, have been mistaken for the Revolution itself by a
blind, forgetful generation. And from this confusion has resulted a
serious, deeply-rooted evil, very difficult to cure among this people:
the adoration of force.
The force of resistance, the desperate effort to defend unity, 1793.
They shudder, and fall on their knees.
The force of invasion and conquest, 1800; the Alps brought low, and
the thunder of Austerlitz. They fall prostrate, and adore. Shall I add,
that, in 1815, with too much tendency to over-value force, and to mistake
success for a judgment of God, they found at the bottom of their hearts,
in their grief and their anger, a miserable argument for justifying
their enemy. Many whispered to themselves, "they are strong, therefore
they are just."
Thus, two evils,
the greatest that can afflict a people, fell upon France at once. Her
own tradition slipped away from her, she forgot herself. And, every
day more uncertain, paler, and more fleeting, the doubtful image of
Right flitted before her eyes.
Let us not take the trouble to inquire why this nation continues to
sink gradually lower, and becomes more weak. Attribute not its decline
to outward causes; let it not accuse either heaven or earth; the evil
is in itself.
The reason why an
insidious tyranny was able to render it a prey to corruption is, that
it was itself corruptible. Weak and unarmed, and ready for temptation,
it had lost sight of the idea by which alone it had been sustained;
like a wretched man deprived of sight, it groped its way in a miry road;
it no longer saw its star. What! the star of victory? No, the sun of
Justice and of the Revolution.
That the powers of darkness should have laboured throughout the earth
to extinguish the light of France, and to smother Right, was natural
enough. But, in spite of all their endeavours, success was impossible.
The wonder is, that the friends of light should help its enemies to
veil and extinguish it.
The party who advocate
liberty have evinced, of late, two sad and serious symptoms of an inward
evil. Let them permit a friend, a solitary writer, to tell them his
entire mind.
A perfidious, an odious hand—the hand of death—has been offered and
stretched out to them, and they have not withdrawn their own. They believed
the foes of religious liberty might become the friends of political
freedom. Vain scholastic distinctions, which obscured their view! Liberty
is liberty.
And to please their enemy, they have proved false to their friend-nay,
to their own father, the great eighteenth century.
They have forgotten that that century had founded liberty on the enfranchisement
of the mind-till then bound down by the flesh, bound by the material
principle of the double incarnation, theological and political, kingly
and sacerdotal. That century, that of the spirit, abolished the gods
of flesh in the state and in religion, so that there was no longer any
idol, and there was no god but God.
Yet why have sincere
friends of liberty formed a league with the party of religious tyranny?
Because they had reduced themselves to a feeble minority. They were
astonished at their own insignificance, and dared not refuse the advances
of a great party which seemed to make overtures to them.
Our fathers did not act thus. They never counted their number. When
Voltaire, a child, in the reign of Louis XIV, entered upon the perilous
career of religious contention, he appeared to be alone. Rousseau stood
alone, in the middle of the century, when, in the dispute between the
Christians and the philosophers, he ventured to lay down the new dogma.
He stood alone. On the morrow the whole world was with him.
If the friends of liberty see their numbers decreasing, they are themselves
to blame. Not a few have invented a system of progressive refinement,
of minute orthodoxy, which aims at making a party a sect, a petty church.
They reject first this, and then that; they abound in restrictions,
distinctions, exclusions. Some new heresy is discovered every day. For
heaven's sake, let us dispute less about the light of Tabor, like besieged
Byzantium—Mahomet II is at our gates.
When the Christian
sects became multiplied, we could find Jansenists, Molinists,etc,
in abundance, but no longer any Christians; and so, the sects which
are the offspring of the Revolution annul the Revolution itself; people
became Constituants, Girondists, Montagnards; but the Revolutionists
ceased to exist.
Voltaire is but little valued, Mirabeau is laid aside, Madame Roland
is excluded, even Danton is not orthodox. What! must none remain but
Robespierre and Saint-Just?
Without disavowing these two men, without wishing to judge them yet,
let one word suffice here: if the Revolution excludes and condemns their
predecessors, it excludes precisely those who gave it a hold upon mankind,
those who for a moment made the whole world revolutionary. If it looks
only to Robespierre and Saint-Just, if it places the images of these
two apostles alone upon its altar, the conversion will be slow, French
propaganda will be no threat, absolute governments may sleep in perfect
security.
Fraternity! Fraternity!
It is not enough to re-echo the word to attract the world to our cause,
as was the case at first. It must acknowledge in us a fraternal heart.
It must be won over by the fraternity of love, and not by the guillotine. Fraternity! Why who since the creation has not pronounced that word?
Do you imagine it was first coined by Robespierre or Mably?
Every state of antiquity
talked of fraternity; but the word was addressed only to citizens,--to
men; the slave was but a thing. And in this case fraternity was exclusive
and inhuman. When slaves or freed-men govern the Empire—when they are named Terence,
Horace, Phedrus, Epictetus, it is difficult not to extend fraternity
to the slave. “Let us be brethren,” cries Christianity. But,
to be a brother, one must first exist; man had no being; right and liberty
alone constitute life. A theory from which these are excluded is but
a speculative fraternity between nought and nought.
"Fraternity, or death," as the reign of Terror subsequently
exclaimed. Once more a brotherhood of slaves. Why, by atrocious derision,
impart to such a union the holy name of liberty?
Brethren who mutually fly from one another, who shudder when they meet, who extend, who withdraw a dead and icy hand. O odious and disgusting sight! Surely if anything ought to be free, it is the fraternal sentiment.
Liberty alone, as founded in the last century, has rendered fraternity possible. Philosophy found man without right, or rather a nonentity entangled in a religious and political system of which despotism was the base. And she said, "Let us create man, let him be, by liberty." No sooner was he created than he loved. It is by liberty, moreover, that our age, awakened and recalled to its true tradition, may likewise commence its work. It will no longer inscribe amongst its laws, "Be my brother, or die!" But by a skilful culture of the best sentiments of the human soul, it will attain its ends in such a manner that all, without compulsion, shall wish to be brothers indeed. The state will realize its destiny, and be a fraternal initiation, an education, a constant exchange of the spontaneous ideas of inspiration and faith which are common to us all, and of the reflected ideas of science and meditation, which are found among thinkers.
Such is the task for our age to accomplish. May it at last set about the work in earnest!
It would indeed
be a melancholy reflection, if, instead of achieving something great
for itself, its time were wasted in censuring that age—so renowned
for its labours, and to which it is so immensely indebted. Our fathers,
we must repeat, did all that it was necessary then to do—began
precisely as it was incumbent on them to begin.
They found despotism in heaven and on earth, and they instituted law.
They found individual man disarmed, bare, unprotected, confounded, lost
in a system of apparent unity, which was no better than common death.
And in order that he might have no appeal, even to the supreme tribunal,
the religious dogma of the day held him bound for the penalty of a transgression
which he had not committed; this eminently carnal dogma supposed that
injustice is transmitted with our blood from father to son.
It was necessary, above all things, to vindicate the rights of man,
which were thus so cruelly outraged, and to re-establish this truth,
which, though obscured, was yet undeniable: "Man has rights, he is something;
he cannot be disowned or annulled, even in the name of God; he is a
responsible creature but for his own actions alone, for whatever good
or evil he himself commits."
Thus does this false liability for the actions of others disappear from
the world. The unjust transmission of good, perpetuated by the rights
of the nobility; the unjust transmission of evil, by original sin, or
the civil brand of being descended from sinners, are effaced by the
Revolution.
0h men of the present age, is this the creed you tax with individualism-is this what you term an egotistical law? But, remember, that without these rights of the individual, by which alone man was constituted, he really had no existence, was incapable of action, and man, therefore, could not fraternize. It was actually necessary to abolish the fraternity of death to found that of life.
Speak not of egotism.
History will answer here, quite as strongly as logic. It was at the
first moment of the Revolution, at the moment she was proclaiming the
rights of the individual, it was then that the soul of France, far from
shrinking, extended, embraced the whole world in sympathetic thought:
then did she offer peace to all, and wish to participate with all her
treasure—liberty.
The moment of birth, the entrance upon a still dubious life, seems to
justify a feeling of egotism in every being. We may observe that the
newly-born infant, above all things, wishes to live, to prolong its
existence. Yet, in the case before us, it was far otherwise. When young
French Liberty first opened her eyes to the light, and uttered that
earliest cry which transports every new creature,—"I am!"’—even in that moment her thoughts were not confined to self; she did
not indulge in a selfish joy, she extended to mankind her life and her
hope; her first impulse, in her cradle, was to open her affectionate
arms. "I am!" she exclaimed to all nations; "0 my brethren,
you shall be also!"
In this lay her glorious error, her touching and sublime weakness: the
Revolution, it must be confessed, commenced by loving everything. She
loved even her enemy, England.
She loved, and long she strove to save, royalty, the key-stone of the
abuses which she had just demolished. She wanted to save the Church;
she endeavoured to remain Christian, being wilfully blind to the contradiction
of the old principle (Arbitrary Grace) and of the new one,(Justice).
This universal sympathy which, at first, made her adopt, and indiscreetly
mingle so many contradictory elements, led her to inconsistency,-to
wish and not to wish, to do and undo, at the same time. Such is the
strange result of our early assemblies. The world has smiled at that
work of hers: but let it not forget, that whatever was discordant in
it, was partly owing to the too easy sympathy, to the indiscriminate
benevolence which was the first feature in our Revolution.
Genius utterly humane!
I love to follow and watch its progress, in those admirable festivals wherein
a whole people, at once the actors and spectators, gave and received
the impulse of moral enthusiasm; wherein every heart expanded with all
the sublimity of France,--of a country which, for its law, proclaimed
the rights of humanity. At the festival of the 14th of July, 1792, among
the sacred images of Liberty and the Law,-in the civic procession,-in
which figured, together with the magistrates, the representatives, the
widows and orphans of those killed at the Bastille,- were seen diverse
emblems,-those of trades useful to men, instruments of agriculture,
ploughs, sheaves, branches loaded with fruits; and the bearers were
crowned with ears of corn and green vine-leaves. But others also were
seen in mourning, crowned with cypress; they were carrying a table covered
with crape, and, under the crape, a veiled sword,-that of the law!
A touching image! Justice, showing her sword in mourning, was no longer
distinguished from Humanity herself.
A year after, the 10th of August, 1793, a very different festival was
celebrated. This one was heroic and gloomy. But the law had been mutilated;
the legislative power had been violated; the judiciary power, unguaranteed
and annulled, was the slave of violence. They dared no longer show the
sword; it was no longer that of Justice; the eye could have borne it
no longer.
A thing to be told
to everybody, and which it is but too easy to prove, is, that the humane
and benevolent period of our Revolution had for its actors the very
people, the whole people—everybody. And the period of violence, the
period of sanguinary deeds, into which danger afterwards thrust it,
had for actors but an inconsiderable, an extremely small number of men.
That is what I have found established and verified, either by written
testimony, or by such as I have gathered from the lips of old men.
The remarkable exclamation of a man who belonged to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine
will never die: "We were all of us at the 10th of August, and not one
at the 2nd of September."
Another thing which this history will render most conspicuous, and which
is true of every party, is, that the people were generally much better
than their leaders. The further I have searched, the more generally
have I found that the more deserving class was ever underneath, buried
among the utterly obscure. I have also found that those brilliant, powerful
speakers, who expressed the thoughts of the masses, are usually but
wrongfully considered as the sole actors. The fact is, that they rather
received than communicated the impulse. The chief actor is the people.
In order to find and restore the latter to its proper position, I have
been obliged to reduce to their proportions those ambitious puppets
whom they had set in motion, and in whom, till now, people fancied they
saw, and have sought for, the secret transactions of history.
This sight, I must
confess, struck me with astonishment. In proportion as I entered more
deeply into this study, I observed that the mere party leaders, those
heroes of the prepared scene, neither foresaw nor prepared anything,
that they were never the first proposers of any grand measure,-more
particularly of those which were the unanimous work of the people at
the outset of the Revolution.
Left to themselves, at those decisive moments, by their pretended leaders,
they found out what was necessary to be done, and did it.
Great, astonishing results! But how much greater was the heart which
conceived them! The deeds themselves are as nothing in comparison. So
astonishing, indeed, was that greatness of heart, that the future may
draw upon it for ever, without fearing to exhaust its resources. No
one can approach its contemplation, without retiring a better man. Every
soul dejected, or crushed with grief, every human or national heart
has but to look there in order to find comfort: it is a mirror wherein
humanity, in beholding itself, becomes once more heroic, magnanimous,
disinterested; a singular purity, shrinking from the contamination of
lucre as from filth, appears to be the characteristic glory of all.
I am endeavouring to describe today that epoch of unanimity, that holy period, when a whole nation, free from all party distinction, as yet a comparative stranger to the opposition of classes, marched together under a flag of brotherly love. Nobody can behold that marvellous unanimity, in which the self-same heart beat together in the breasts of twenty millions of men, without returning thanks to God. These are the sacred days of the world-thrice happy days for history. For my part, I have had my reward, in the mere narration of them. Never, since the composition of my Maid of Orleans, have I received such a ray from above, such a vivid inspiration from Heaven.
But as "our
thread of life is of a mingled yarn," whilst I enjoyed so much
happiness in reviving the annals of France, my own peace has been disturbed
for ever. I have lost him who so often narrated the scenes of the Revolution
to me, him whom I revered as the image and venerable witness of the
Great Age, that is, of the eighteenth century. I have lost my father,
with whom I had lived all my life—forty-eight years.
When that blow fell upon me, I was lost in contemplation. I was elsewhere,
hastily realizing this work, so long the object of my meditation. I
was at the foot of the Bastille, taking that fortress, and planting
our immortal banner upon its towers.
That blow came upon me, unforeseen, like a shot from the Bastille.
Many of these important questions, which have obliged me to fathom deeply
the foundations of my faith, have been investigated by me during the
most awful circumstances that can attend human life, between death and
the grave—when the survivor, himself partly dead, has been sitting
in judgment between two worlds. Then I resumed my course, even to the
conclusion of this work, whilst death and life had equal claims upon
my mind. I struggled to keep my heart in the closest communion with
justice, strengthening myself in my faith by my very bereavements and
my hopes; and, in proportion as my own household gods were shattered,
I clung to those of my native land.