Reflections on the Revolution in France

“ The dîme, the corvée, and almost all the droits seigneuriaux were falling or had fallen even before the actual revolution began, and every other abuse would have gradually yielded to the power of time and the increase of knowledge. But the French were not contented to wait; they slew a good king, deluged their fields in blood, and stained their annals with crime, to obtain what a few years would have peaceably brought about.
France has never yet perfectly recovered the revolution; the character of the people has been injured by it, and all the foundations of society have been shaken. ”

“ The Revolution! Gentlemen, you attack the Revolution! What folly! The Revolution includes the whole nation, except those who exploit it; it is our country, fulfilling the sacred mission of freeing the people entrusted to it by Providence; it is the whole of France, doing its duty to the world! As for ourselves, we believe in our hearts that we have done our duty to France, and every time she has need of us, no matter what she, our revered mother, asks of us, we, her faithful sons, will obey her! ”

“ Against all royalist and imperial reaction, the lesser revolutions of the nineteenth century have kept alive the essential spirit of the great Revolution of 1789, inherited by them, and handed down to the present Republic, that the assured ultimate issue may be fought out under its Tricolor. France, the splendid creature, once more almost throttled by priest and soldier, has saved herself by the courage of 38 a national conscience, such as has not been matched by any land in any crisis. ”

“ It is not strange that the astonishing revolution in France should be beheld with very extraordinary emotions. The world had viewed the excision of a king, queen, and the royal family of the House of Bourbon. The existing generation had witnessed the extinction of the claims of a long line of ancestral dignitaries, that had been supported from Charlemagne to Louis XVI, under all the appendages of despotism that had oppressed its millions, until they had reached that point of degradation and servility beyond which the elastic mind of man can bend no farther. ”

“ The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of France.
It is said that the three great events of modern times are the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day, nor of a single man. ”

“ In fine, we should become in the eyes of the world what France now is—a people ready to sacrifice every solid advantage, every gradual, and therefore permanent, improvement, every ripening fruit that time and care, and the sunshine of peace only can mature, to a genius for revolution.
This turbulent torrent of headlong reform, to-day flooding its banks, to-morrow dribbling in a half-dry channel, the aristocracy of power collects, concentrates, and converts into a power, even while it circumscribes it, and represses. ”

“ Popular discontent, not the exceptionally miserable condition of the French people, accounts for the Revolution.
The real reason why France was the first among the European countries to carry out a great reform and do away with the irritating survivals of feudalism was not that the nation was miserable and oppressed above all others, but that it was sufficiently free and enlightened to realize the evils and absurdities of the old régime. Mere oppression and misery does not account for a revolution, there must also be active discontent ”

“ it shows the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions. ”

“ Wherever one goes, in France, one meets, looking backward a little, the spectre of the great Revolution; and one meets it always in the shape of the destruction of something beautiful and precious. To make us forgive it at all, how much it must also have destroyed that was more hateful than itself! ”

“ It is this paradox, which we must always keep in mind when we are discussing any question relative to the effects of the French revolution. Groaning under every degree of misery, the victim of its own crimes, and, as I once before expressed it in this House, asking pardon of God and of man for the miseries which it has brought upon itself and others, France still retains (while it has neither left means of comfort nor almost of subsistence to its own inhabitants) new and unexampled means of annoyance and destruction against all the other Powers of Europe. ”

“ It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! ”

“ In addition to the active Red Republican Party and its popular leaders, there has always existed in France a class of men who have made the history of the great Revolution their life-study. These men naturally conceive of every revolution as modelling itself on the lines of the French Revolution of 1789–96. Their influence has reacted on the popular movement and its leaders, and confirmed the natural bias of every Frenchman to try and re-live and re-act the greatest epoch in his national history, the general outlines and prominent names of which he is familiar with from his youth up. ”

“ Democratic ideas were in the air, and all except the privileged classes were ready for general revolt. Frenchmen returning from America reported the successful working of the new order of things inaugurated by the Revolution there, and this gave stronger impulse to the revolutionary tendency in France. ”

“ The changes made by that Revolution were not the better to accommodate her to the old and usual relations, but to produce new ones. The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable; not to make her a neighbour, but a mistress; not to make her more observant of laws, but to put her in a condition to impose them. To make France truly formidable it was necessary that France should be new modelled. ”

“ The memorable Revolution of 1793, the most terrible among the revolutions of Europe, testifies still more strongly to the exclusive and imperative incapacity of French innovators and political adventurers, whose shadowy training, jealous sentiments, and "swashbuckler" traditions constitute what to-day's Frenchmen call a Republican policy, and which they put forward once more and try to filter into the popular imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ INTRODUCTION. CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTION.—The French Revolution was a tremendous upheaval of society, which brought with it the abolition of feudalism and monarchy, and the securing of an equality of political rights. Its immediate result in France was the establishment of a democratic republic, followed by an empire resting on military power. Its conquests, and the predominance of France, provoked an uprising of the other European peoples in behalf of national independence. This overthrew the French empire, and produced a temporary restoration of the old dynasty. ”

“ Had the spirit of the queen been dominant, it is possible that the Revolution in its infancy might have been crushed with an iron hand. All the disciplined armies of Europe were ready to fall upon the unorganized and unarmed populace of France, and to chastise them into submission. Had the moderate and humane spirit of the king prevailed, the Constitution might have been accepted; the king might have been revered and beloved as a constitutional monarch, and France might have passed from despotism to free institutions without bloodshed. ”

“ Just as French tragedy, when it came into being, had refused to build upon the foundation of the history of its own country, had turned its back on French tradition and laid its scenes in far-away Rome in the far-off, dimly discerned past, now the Revolution, heedless of history, heedless of the France of its own day, took far-off, un-historically appreciated antiquity, with its republicans, evolved under such different conditions, as the model to be exactly imitated. ”

“ When those that were exclusive and unequal were abandoned, it was necessary to define and to insist on those that were equal and the property of all. After destroying, the French had to rebuild, and to base their new structure upon principles unknown to the law, unfamiliar to the people, absolutely opposed to the lesson of their history and to all the experience of the ages in which France had been so great. ”

“ As this Revolution was made by fools and idiots for the benefit of those who acquired national lands, and resulted in nothing but making the fortune of crafty peasants and financiering bourgeois, the Revolution only made stronger, under the pretence of making all men equal, the empire of wealth. It has betrayed France into the hands of the men of wealth. ”

“ These facts, and the harmony with which the inexperienced multitude took this first great step toward national regeneration, excited throughout aristocratic Europe amazement and alarm. Kings and nobles alike trembled. All the states of Europe, like France, were oppressed by feudal despotism. All the people of Europe might, like the French, demand reform. ”

“ In the scenes of blood and terror which accompanied it, and in the dramatic episodes and strange actors appearing upon its stage—in these respects, if not in the calculable effects of the uprising on France and the world, the French Revolution was the most extraordinary outbreak of modern times. ”

“ Excuse me, therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day -- I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions. ”

“ In that stupendous work, no one principle, by which the human mind may have its faculties at once invigorated and depraved, was left unemployed; but I can speak it to a certainty, and support it by undoubted proofs, that the ruling principle of those who acted in the Revolution as statesmen, had the exterior aggrandisement of France as their ultimate end in the most minute part of the internal changes that were made. ”

“ But the armies of aristocratic opposition were gathering to crush this liberty, which threatened to spread to other states. Despotic Europe combined, and with all her accumulated armies fell upon the people of France. The recently emancipated people fought to protect themselves from new chains with all the blind fury and ferocity of despair. ”

“ For if France is again to revolve through years and through seas of blood and crime, and to terminate, at last, at the point from which she set out—a despotism—despair will fill the European world, and the people will be disposed rather to bear the ills they have, than to encounter the unavailing horrors of the double precedent which France will have set. Let us look, therefore, calmly, for a few moments, at the very interesting question of the probable stability and success of this revolution. ”

“ That they were to regenerate France; that the nation long enslaved, corrupted and degraded was to be emancipated, enlightened, and elevated by them, was his heartfelt belief. The material advantages of a great revolution to those who should effect it, he would not stop to consider. ”

“ It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath.”
“Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity.” ”

“ Disorder and confusion soon wear themselves out. But the story of the Great French Revolution will never be forgotten while history exists. It stands there as a terrible warning of the fate of a nation whose rulers neither themselves regard, nor teach to those below them, the Divine laws of justice and mercy and love to all mankind. ”

“ The French Revolution, with its dramatic overthrow of tyranny and its splendid watchword, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ made its own appeal to the hope as well as the imagination of the English people, although the sanguinary incidents which marked it retarded the movement for Reform in England, and as a matter of fact sent the Reformers into the wilderness for the space of forty years. ”