Although in its beginnings a religious or political revolution may very well be supported by rational elements, it is developed only by the aid of mystic and affective elements which are absolutely foreign to reason.
The historians who have judged the events of the French Revolution in the name of rational logic could not comprehend them, since this form of logic did not dictate them.As the actors of these events themselves understood them but ill, we shall not be far from the truth in saying that our Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those who caused it and by those who have described it.At no period of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore the past, and so poorly divine the future.
...The power of the Revolution did not reside in the principles--which for that matter were anything but novel--which it sought to propagate, nor in the institutions which it sought to found.The people cares very little for institutions and even less for doctrines.That the Revolution was potent indeed, that it made France accept the violence, the murders, the ruin and the horror of a frightful civil war, that finally it defended itself victoriously against a Europe in arms, was due to the fact that it had founded not a new system of government but a new religion.
Now history shows us how irresistible is the might of a strong belief.Invincible Rome herself had to bow before the armies of nomad shepherds illuminated by the faith of Mahommed.For the same reason the kings of Europe could not resist the tatterdemalion soldiers of the Convention.Like all apostles, they were ready to immolate themselves in the sole end of propagating their beliefs, which according to their dream were to renew the world.
The religion thus founded had the force of other religions, if not their duration.Yet it did not perish without leaving indelible traces, and its influence is active still.
We shall not consider the Revolution as a clean sweep in history, as its apostles believed it.We know that to demonstrate their intention of creating a world distinct from the old they initiated a new era and professed to break entirely with all vestiges of the past.
But the past never dies.It is even more truly within us than without us.Against their will the reformers of the Revolution remained saturated with the past, and could only continue, under other names, the traditions of the monarchy, even exaggerating the autocracy and centralisation of the old system.Tocqueville had no difficulty in proving that the Revolution did little but overturn that which was about to fall.
If in reality the Revolution destroyed but little it favoured the fruition of certain ideas which continued thenceforth to develop.
The fraternity and liberty which it proclaimed never greatly seduced the peoples, but equality became their gospel: the pivot of socialism and of the entire evolution of modern democratic ideas.We may therefore say that the Revolution did not end with the advent of the Empire, nor with the successive restorations which followed it.Secretly or in the light of day it has slowly unrolled itself and still affects men's minds.
The study of the French Revolution to which a great part of this book is devoted will perhaps deprive the reader of more than one illusion, by proving to him that the books which recount the history of the Revolution contain in reality a mass of legends very remote from reality.
These legends will doubtless retain more life than history itself.Do not regret this too greatly.It may interest a few philosophers to know the truth, but the peoples will always prefer dreams.Synthetising their ideal, such dreams will always constitute powerful motives of action.One would lose courage were it not sustained by false ideas, said Fontenelle.Joan of Arc, the Giants of the Convention, the Imperial epic--all these dazzling images of the past will always remain sources of hope in the gloomy hours that follow defeat.They form part of that patrimony of illusions left us by our fathers, whose power is often greater than that of reality.The dream, the ideal, the legend--in a word, the unreal--it is that which shapes history.
