``...Little petty tyrants spring up who have all the vices of a single tyrant.Very soon what is left of liberty becomes untenable; a single tyrant arises, and the people loses all, even the advantages of corruption.
``Democracy has therefore two extremes to avoid; the extreme of the spirit of equality leads to the despotism of a single person, as the despotism of a single person leads to conquest.''
The ideal of Montesquieu was the English constitutional government, which prevented the monarchy from degenerating into despotism.Otherwise the influence of this philosopher at the moment of the Revolution was very slight.
As for the Encyclopaedists, to whom such a considerable role is attributed, they hardly dealt with politics, excepting d'Holbach, a liberal monarchist like Voltaire and Diderot.They wrote chiefly in defence of individual liberty, opposing the encroachments of the Church, at that time extremely intolerant and inimical to philosophers.Being neither Socialists nor democrats, the Revolution could not utilise any of their principles.
Voltaire himself was by no means a partisan of democracy.
``Democracy,'' he said, ``seems only to suit a very small country, and even then it must be fortunately situated.
Little as it may be, it will make many mistakes, because it will be composed of men.Discord will prevail there as in a convent full of monks; but there will be no St.Bartholomew's day, no Irish massacres, no Sicilian Vespers, no Inquisition, no condemnation to the galleys for having taken water from the sea without paying for it; unless we suppose this republic to be composed of devils in a corner of hell.''
All these men who are supposed to have inspired the Revolution had opinions which were far from subversive, and it is really difficult to see that they had any real influence on the development of the revolutionary movement.Rousseau was one of the very few democratic philosophers of his age, which is why his Contrat Social became the Bible of the men of the Terror.It seemed to furnish the rational justification necessary to excuse the acts deriving from unconscious mystic and affective impulses which no philosophy had inspired.
To be quite truthful, the democratic instincts of Rousseau were by no means above suspicion.He himself considered that his projects for social reorganisation, based upon popular sovereignty, could be applied only to a very small State; and when the Poles asked him for a draft democratic Constitution he advised them to choose a hereditary monarch.
Among the theories of Rousseau that relating to the perfection of the primitive social state had a great success.He asserted, together with various writers of his time, that primitive mankind was perfect; it was corrupted only by society.By modifying society by means of good laws one might bring back the happiness of the early world.Ignorant of all psychology, he believed that men were the same throughout time and space and that they could all be ruled by the same laws and institutions.
This was then the general belief.``The vices and virtues of the people,'' wrote Helvetius, ``are always a necessary effect of its legislation....How can we doubt that virtue is in the case of all peoples the result of the wisdom, more or less perfect, of the administration?''
There could be no greater mistake.
3.The Philosophical Ideas of the Bourgeoisie at the Time of the Revolution.
It is by no means easy to say just what were the social and political conceptions of a Frenchman of the middle classes at the moment of the Revolution.They might be reduced to a few formulae concerning fraternity, equality, and popular government, summed up in the celebrated Declaration of the Rights of Man, of which we shall have occasion to quote a few passages.
The philosophers of the eighteenth century do not seem to have been very highly rated by the men of the Revolution.Rarely are they quoted in the speeches of the time.Hypnotised by their classical memories of Greece and Rome, the new legislators re-read their Plato and their Plutarch.They wished to revive the constitution of Sparta, with its manners, its frugal habits, and its laws.
Lycurgus, Solon, Miltiades, Manlius Torquatus, Brutus, Mucius Scaevola, even the fabulous Minos himself, became as familiar in the tribune as in the theatre, and the public went crazy over them.The shades of the heroes of antiquity hovered over the revolutionary assemblies.Posterity alone has replaced them by the shades of the philosophers of the eighteenth century.
We shall see that in reality the men of this period, generally represented as bold innovators guided by subtle philosophers, professed to effect no innovations whatever, but to return to a past long buried in the mists of history, and which, moreover, they scarcely ever in the least understood.
The more reasonable, who did not go so far back for their models, aimed merely at adopting the English constitutional system, of which Montesquieu and Voltaire had sung the praises, and which all nations were finally to imitate without violent crises.
Their ambitions were confined to a desire to perfect the existing monarchy, not to overthrow it.But in time of revolution men often take a very different path from that they propose to take.
At the time of the convocation of the States General no one would ever have supposed that a revolution of peaceful bourgeoisie and men of letters would rapidly be transformed into one of the most sanguinary dictatorships of history.
