The French Revolution | Page 2

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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I
THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
The magnitude of an event is too apt to lie with its reporter, and the reporter often fails in
his sense of historical proportion. The nearer he is to the event the more authority he has
as a witness, but the less authority as a judge. It is time alone can establish the relation
and harmony of things. This is notably the case with the greatest event of modern
European history, the French Revolution, and the first task of the historian writing a
century later, is to attempt to catch its perspective. To do this the simplest course will be
to see how the Revolution has been interpreted from the moment of its close to the
present day.

It was Madame de Staël, under the influence of Constant, who first made Europe listen to
reason after the Bourbon restoration of 1815. {2} Her Considérations sur la Révolution
francaise, published in 1818, one year after her death, was a bold though temperate plea
for the cause of political liberty. At a moment of reaction when the Holy Alliance
proclaimed the fraternity not of men but of monarchs, and the direct delegation by Divine
Providence of its essential virtues to Alexander, Frederick William and Francis,--at a
moment when the men of the Convention were proscribed as regicides, when the word
Jacobin sent a thrill of horror down every respectable spinal chord, the daughter of
Necker raised her voice to say that if, during the stormy years just passed, the people of
France had done nothing but stumble from crime to folly and from folly to crime, the
fault did not, after all, lie with them, but with the old régime. If Frenchmen had failed to
show the virtues of freemen, it was because they had for so many centuries been treated
as slaves. This was in 1818, three years after Waterloo.
Madame de Staël was a pamphleteer; the historians soon followed. Thiers in 1823,
Mignet in 1824, produced the first important histories of the Revolution; the former more
eloquent, more popular; the latter more ballasted with documentary evidence, more {3}
accurate, more pedestrian, in fact, to this day, in its negative manner, one of the best
general histories of the matter. Both of these writers were too near their subject and too
hampered by the reactionary surroundings of the moment to be successful when dealing
with the larger questions the French Revolution involved. Thiers, going a step beyond
Madame de Staël, fastened eagerly on the heroic aspects of his subject. It was with this
emphasis that later, under the more liberal régime of Louis Philippe, he continued his
work through the epoch of Napoleon and produced his immensely popular but extremely
unsound history of the Consulate and the Empire. In 1840 the remains of Napoleon were
transferred from St. Helena to Paris, and were processionally drawn to the Invalides
surrounded by the striking figures and uniforms of a handful of surviving veterans,
acclaimed by the ringing rhetoric of Victor Hugo, who in prose and in verse vividly
formulated the Napoleonic legend. And just before and just after this event, so made to
strike the imagination and to prepare changes of opinion, came a series of notable books.
They were all similar in that they bore the stamp of the romanticism of the thirties and
forties, interpreting history in terms of the {4} individual; but they differed in their
political bias. These works were written by Carlyle, Louis Blanc, Lamartine and
Michelet.
Carlyle's French Revolution belongs far more to the domain of literature than to that of
history. Its brilliancy may still dazzle those who are able to think of Carlyle as no more
than the literary artist; it will not blind those who see foremost in him the great
humanitarian. He was too impulsive an artist to resist the high lights of his subject, and
was hypnotized by Versailles and the guillotine just as his contemporary Turner was by
the glories of flaming sunsets and tumbling waves. The book is a magnificent quest for an
unfindable hero, but it is not the French Revolution.
Carlyle's French contemporaries add the note of the party man to his individualistic
impressionism, and all three are strong apologists of the Revolution. Lamartine extols the
Girondins; Blanc sanctifies Robespierre, whom he mistakes for an apostle of socialism;
Michelet, as enthusiastic as either, but larger in his views and much more profound as a

scholar, sees the Revolution as a whole and hails in it the regeneration of humanity.
Within a few days of the publication of his {5} first volumes, France had risen in
revolution once more and had proclaimed the Second Republic. She then, in the space of
a few months, passed through all