The French Revolution | Page 3

the phases of political thought which Thiers, Blanc,
Lamartine and Michelet had glorified--the democratic, the bourgeois, the autocratic
republic, and finally the relapse into the empire--the empire of Louis Napoleon.
And, essentially, the histories of the Revolution produced by these writers were special
pleadings for a defeated cause, springing up in the year 1848 to a new assertion. Under
the Second Empire, with autocracy even more triumphant than under the brothers of
Louis XVI, they became the gospels of the recalcitrant liberalism of France; Michelet the
gospel of the intellectuals, Blanc the gospel of the proletarians. De Tocqueville added his
voice to theirs, his Ancien Régime appearing in 1856. Then came 1870, the fall of the
Empire, and 1871, the struggle between the middle class republic of Thiers, and the
proletarian republic of Paris. The latter, vanquished once more, disappeared in a
nightmare of assassination and incendiarism.
It was under the impression of this disaster that Taine set to work to investigate the past
{6} of his country, and particularly the great Revolution on which all else appeared to be
founded. Between 1875 and 1894 he produced his Origines de la France Contemporaine,
which in a sense supplanted all previous works on the Revolution. Behind it could be
plainly perceived a huge scaffolding of erudite labour, and the working of an intellect of
abnormal power; but what was not so apparent, and is now only being slowly recognised,
was that much of this erudition was hasty and inspired by preconceived opinions, and that
Taine's genius was more philosophic than historic. Assuming the validity of the
impressions he had formed when witnessing the agony of Paris in the spring of 1871, his
history of the Revolution was a powerful and brilliant vindication of those impressions.
But it is only the philosopher who forms his opinions before considering the facts, the
historian instinctively reverses the order of these phenomena. As it was, Taine's great
work made a tremendous impact on the intellect of his generation, and nearly all that has
been written on the Revolution since his day is marked with his mark. His thesis was that
the Church and the State were the great institutions whereby brute man had acquired his
small share of justice and {7} reason, and that to hack at the root of both State and
Church was fatal; it could only lead to the dictatorship of the soldier or to that of the mob.
Of these two evils the former appeared to him the less, while the latter he could only
think of in terms of folly and outrage. Taine's conservatism was the reaction of opinion
against the violence of the Commune and the weak beginnings of the Third Republic, as
Michelet's liberalism had been its reaction against Orleanist and Bonapartist middle class
and military dictation.
Since Taine's great book, the influence of which is, in this year 1909, only just beginning
to fade, what have we had? Passing over von Sybel's considerable and popular history of
the Revolution, we have Sorel's L'Europe et la Révolution française, more historical,
more balanced than Taine's work, clear in style and in arrangement, but on the whole
superficial in ideas and incorrect in details. Of far deeper significance is the Histoire
Socialiste of Jean Jaurès, of which the title is too narrow; Histoire du peuple, or Histoire
des classes ouvrières, would have more closely defined the scope of this remarkable

work. Here we have a new phenomenon, history written for the labouring class and from
the point of {8} view of the labouring class. And although not free from the taint of the
party pamphlet, not of the first rank for historical erudition, intellectual force or artistic
composition, Jaurès' history presents the Revolution under the aspect that gives most food
for thought and that places it most directly in touch with the problems of the present.
Last of all, what of the labours of the professed historian of to-day? Few of the writers
just named could stand the tests rigidly applied to the young men sent out in large
numbers of recent years by the universities as technically trained historians. Of these
many have turned their attention to the vast field offered by the Revolution and some
have done good work. The trend of modern effort, however, is to straighten out the
details but to avoid the large issues; to establish beyond question the precise shade of the
colour of Robespierre's breeches, but to give up as unattainable having any opinion
whatever on the French Revolution as a whole. Not but that, here and there, excellent
work is being done. Aulard has published an important history of the Revolution which is
a good corrective to Taine's; the Ministry of Public Instruction helps the publication of
the documents drawn {9} up to