Advocates and detractors of the Revolution often admit the fatality of revolutionary events.This theory is well synthetised in the following passage from the History of the Revolution, by Emile Olivier:--``No man could oppose it.The blame belongs neither to those who perished nor to those who survived; there was no individual force capable of changing the elements and of foreseeing the events which were born of the nature of things and circumstances.''
Taine himself inclines to this idea:--
``At the moment when the States General were opened the course of ideas and events was not only determined but even visible.Each generation unwittingly bears within itself its future and its past; from the latter its destinies might have been foretold long before the issue.''
Other modern authors, who profess no more indulgence for the violence of the revolutionaries than did Taine, are equally convinced of this fatality.M.Sorel, after recalling the saying of Bossuet concerning the revolutions of antiquity: ``Everything is surprising if we only consider particular causes, and yet everything goes forward in regular sequence,'' expresses an intention which he very imperfectly realises: ``to show in the Revolution, which seems to some the subversion and to others the regeneration of the old European world, the natural and necessary result of the history of Europe, and to show, moreover, that this revolution had no result--not even the most unexpected--that did not ensue from this history, and was not explained by the precedents of the ancien regime.''
Guizot also had formerly attempted to prove that our Revolution, which he quite wrongly compared to that of England, was perfectly natural and effected no innovations:--``Far from having broken with the natural course of events in Europe, neither the English revolution nor our own did, intended, or said anything that had not been said, intended, and done a hundred years before its outbreak.
``...Whether we regard the general doctrines of the two revolutions or the application made of them--whether we deal with the government of the State or with the civil legislation, with property or with persons, with liberty or with power, we shall find nothing of which the invention can be attributed to them, nothing that will not be encountered elsewhere, or that was not at least originated in times which we qualify as normal.''
All these assertions merely recall the banal law that a phenomenon is simply the consequence of previous phenomena.Such very general propositions do not teach us much.
We must not try to explain too many events by the principle of fatality adopted by so many historians.I have elsewhere discussed the significance of such fatalities, and have shown that the whole effort of civilisation consists in trying to escape therefrom.Certainly history is full of necessities, but it is also full of contingent facts which were, and might not have been.Napoleon himself, on St.Helena, enumerated six circumstances which might have checked his prodigious career.He related, notably, that on taking a bath at Auxonne, in 1786, he only escaped death by the fortuitous presence of a sandbank.If Bonaparte had died, then we may admit that another general would have arisen, and might have become dictator.But what would have become of the Imperial epic and its consequences without the man of genius who led our victorious armies into all the capitals of Europe?
It is permissible to consider the Revolution as being partly a necessity, but it was above all--which is what the fatalistic writers already cited do not show us--a permanent struggle between theorists who were imbued with a new ideal, and the economic, social, and political laws which ruled mankind, and which they did not understand.Not understanding them, they sought in vain to direct the course of events, were exasperated at their failure, and finally committed every species of violence.They decreed that the paper money known as assignats should be accepted as the equivalent of gold, and all their threats could not prevent the fictitious value of such money falling almost to nothing.They decreed the law of the maximum, and it merely increased the evils it was intended to remedy.
Robespierre declared before the Convention ``that all the sans-culottes will be paid at the expense of the public treasury, which will be fed by the rich,'' and in spite of requisitions and the guillotine the treasury remained empty.
Having broken all human restraints, the men of the Revolution finally discovered that a society cannot live without them; but when they sought to create them anew they saw that even the strongest society, though supported by the fear of the guillotine, could not replace the discipline which the past had slowly built up in the minds of men.As for understanding the evolution of society, or judging men's hearts and minds, or foreseeing the consequences of the laws they enacted, they scarcely attempted to do so.
The events of the Revolution did not ensue from irreducible necessities.They were far more the consequence of Jacobin principles than of circumstances, and might have been quite other than they were.Would the Revolution have followed the same path if Louis XVI.had been better advised, or if the Constituent Assembly had been less cowardly in times of popular insurrection? The theory of revolutionary fatality is only useful to justify violence by presenting it as inevitable.
Whether we are dealing with science or with history we must beware of the ignorance which takes shelter under the shibboleth of fatalism Nature was formerly full of a host of fatalities which science is slowly contriving to avoid.The function of the superior man is, as I have shown elsewhere, to avert such fatalities.
3.The Hesitations of recent Historians of the Revolution.
