the French Revolution

FRENCH REVOLUTION, THE. There have been sev eral revolutions in France, but when the French Revolution is spoken of without qualification it means the great revolution, by which, towards the close of the 18th century, the old order in France was overthrown. Though the Revolution passed through many phases and its beginnings must be set far back in the history of France, orie event was from the first held to mark its decisive moment. When, on the afternoon of July 14, 1789, the Duc de La IPochef oucauld-Liancourt brought to King Louis XVI. at Ver sailles the news of the capture of the Bastille, the king exclaimed : "Why, this is a revolt !" "No, Sire," replied the duke, "It is a revo lution." Three days later the tidings reached Arthur Young at Nancy; he noted in his journal that he had just received the news of the "complete overthrow of the old order." To this day the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, July 14, is celebrated by the French as the birthday of their national liberties.

It is not proposed here to explain why the capture by the popu lace of an old castle-prison, garrisoned by a handful of pensioners, was at once taken as marking the downfall of the old autocratic regime in France; an account of the Revolution which this her alded, of its antecedent causes, and of its later developments will be found in the article FRANCE : History. But the great Revolu tion was of epoch-making importance, not for France only, but for the whole world; for it set in motion those revolutionary forces—democracy, nationalism, socialism—which have changed the face of Europe and of the world, and are not yet spent. To say this, is not to belittle the importance of the American Revolu tion, which preceded the French Revolution and to a great extent inspired it. July 4, 1776, was certainly also an epoch-making date. The American Declaration of Independence first laid down the principle that governments derive their just powers from the con sent of the governed, and so for the first time authoritatively pro claimed democracy as the only legitimate foundation of civil society. But the American Revolution was not so revolutionary as at first it seemed. Though a breach was made with England, no breach was made with English traditions of government and law. Of those who signed the Declaration of Independence but very few were democrats at heart. They subscribed to the revolution ary principles embodied by Jefferson in the preamble, but they had no idea of giving them a logical and universal application. That was reserved for the French. The Americans first estab lished modern democracy. The French made it a militant creed.

There had been revolutions in Europe bef ore 1789; but these revolutions had been strictly limited in their aims, and there had been no idea of setting up one form of constitution as absolutely superior to all others. Before 1789 the words "republic" and "democracy" conveyed no suggestion of revolutionary peril. Though Rousseau declared the ultimate sovereignty of the people to be inalienable, and all governments not established on this basis usurpations, he agreed with Montesquieu that republicanism and democracy were suitable only to small States, and were therefore peaceful in their tendencies. Even when a great new Republic was founded beyond the Atlantic, the monarchs watched its rise without misgiving, and even assisted in its foundation. "Time is necessary for the creation of a conquering people," said a contemporary diplomatic report, "It is more difficult to produce the spirit of conquest in a republic than in the head of a govern ment which is entrusted to a single person." This was an illusion which the history of the French Revolution should have dispelled, though it still persists. It serves partly to explain the apathy displayed at the outset by the Continental monarchs towards the troubles of their brother of France, which they even regarded as providential, since they prevented him from interfering with their plans for the final partition of Poland. It was only gradually that they awoke to the fact that the triumph of the Revolution in Paris had introduced a wholly new factor into international politics, and one very perilous to themselves. For the principles of the Revolution had an application far beyond the borders of France, since the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people as the only legitimate foundation of government challenged the right to exist of every State in Europe. This was the new thing which the crusading spirit of the Revolution revealed to the world : political idealism in arms, war waged, not in the name of the State for purposes of conquest, but in the name of humanity to set up everywhere on the ruins of the old order the theoreti cally perfect State. There were those, even at the time, who could read the meaning of the portent. Goethe was present when, at Valmy on Sept. 20, 1792, the ragged levies of the nascent French Republic withstood the attack of Brunswick's Prussian veterans. "From this place and this day," he noted in his diary, "dates a new epoch in the history of the world, and you will be able to say: I was there." Characteristics of the Revolution.—The French Revolu tion, by the challenge thrown down to all the old world, had re vealed itself as different to any revolution that had hitherto been.

In what did this difference consist ? and what were its causes? The essential difference was that the French Revolution, increas ingly as overturn succeeded overturn, represented not so much an effort to remedy admitted evils in the body politic, as an effort to recreate it on an ideal basis. "What does this mysterious science of government and legislation amount to?" said Robespierre, "To putting into the laws the moral truths culled from the works of the philosophers." In holding this view Robespierre was not singular, though he was the most rigid in upholding it. Of the 1,200 deputies who met in the States-General at Versailles, in May 1789, but few had any experience of the practical problems of government, or had learned politics in any other school than the conversations of the salons and the writings of the philosophers. So far as they were not merely conservative, the champions of outworn prerogatives and privilege, they were for the most part—as Talleyrand was to put it—"builders of theories for an imaginary world." The voices of those who, like Mirabeau, realized the force of tradition in human affairs, and tried to hold fast what was good and useful in the old order, were soon silenced by the eloquence of the ideo logues and—the roar of the Paris mob. And so, beginning with the "orgy" of Aug. 4, 1789, the old order was swept away before a new order was ready to take its place. The internal history of France during the Revolution is mainly that of successive attempts to build up an ideal order on the ruins.

Divergent Tendencies.

The process, of course, was not simple. The Revolutionists might agree on the principles embod ied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but they differed about their application. The Constitution of 1791 was ostensibly an effort to apply them logically; but its framers tempered their logic with a bourgeois caution; for them "equality" meant at most equality bef ore the law, not equality of opportunity, and they limited the franchise in the interests of the possessing classes. The Constitution was overthrown, with the monarchy, on Aug. 1o, 1792; but the rift it had created in the revolutionary ranks con tinued, and widened, in the National Convention.

The struggle between the Girondins (see GIRONDISTS) and the Mountain (q.v.), as M. Albert Mathiez has now shown, was no mere struggle of rival groups for power, nor was it primarily a revolt of the provinces against the predominance of Paris and the Paris mob. Though the border-line between the factions was never very clearly marked, the essential difference between them was that the Girondins, though republicans and idealists, were champions of the rights of property, while the Mountain, which depended for its power on the organized mob of Paris, tended more and more in the direction of what is now called Socialism. It is a question how far this tendency was deliberate, or how far the socialistic laws (Law of the Maximum, etc.) put in force under the Terror were merely "war measures." But, at least in the case of Robespierre and his party, it now seems clear that they represented a conscious attempt to realize the ideal of the Socialist Republic. Socialists, from Buonarotti onwards, have claimed him, not without reason, as the apostle and protomartyr of their economic creed.

The Revolution and Nationalism.

If modern democracy, in its various developments, received its first great impulse from the Revolution, this is also true of nationalism, which during the century was to prove the most powerful solvent of the estab lished order. The principle of nationality was not, indeed, origi nally part of the revolutionary gospel, which was beautifully cos mopolitan. The orators of the Constituent Assembly held up the ideal of universal peace, and asserted with confidence that regen erated France would never again wage wars of conquest ; and those who later, in the Legislative Assembly, clamoured for war spoke of carrying "liberty" to oppressed peoples. But already the mood was changing. The threat of foreign invasion had aroused in the French themselves an intense national consciousness, and Danton was not alone in urging that the great object of the war should be to gain for France the frontiers "fixed by nature"—the Rhine, the Alps and the Pyrenees. And so, almost insensibly, the war of defence and revolutionary propaganda developed into a war of conquest, till in the end the rights of man were forgotten, blotted out by the splendour of the man, Napoleon, who had become the incarnation of a Revolution now identified with all the glories of France.

The sparks from the conflagration in Paris had meanwhile been carried far and wide, and had started fires even in places unex pected and remote, where they glowed under the surface, to burst into flame later. But though the agitations, which were in the end to lead to the rise of a whole series of new nations in eastern Europe, were sometimes inspired at the outset by French revolu tionary doctrines, it was not so much these doctrines which gave its mighty impulse to the new spirit of nationality in Europe at large as the example of French nationalism, and the reaction against it when it became a conquering force. In Italy Napoleon, for his own purposes, deliberately awakened a national conscious ness which had slumbered for a thousand years. In Germany, which like Italy had become little more than "a geographical ex pression," the humiliations he inflicted stirred up memories of ancient greatness and a new passion for national unity. When Spain set the example of national resistance, and with success, all Europe recognized that a new force had come into the world; that war was no longer a mere ordeal by battle, to be f ought out according to fixed rules by professional armies, but a trial of strength between nations in arms. And so it was that, in their final struggle against the revolutionary doctrine of conquest, as em bodied in Napoleon, the monarchs themselves appealed to the new-born national sentiment of the peoples, and not in vain. The battle of Leipzig, which practically sealed Napoleon's doom, is rightly known as "the Battle of the Nations." The processes of national segregation and national expansion, then, which during the century that followed changed the face of Europe, received their first great impulse from the French Revolu tion. The result has been a complete change in the substance of the old order, even where the outward semblance has remained un altered. Everywhere before the World War, except in the Austrian and Ottoman empires, sovereignty had ceased to be territorial and become national; even in Germany, where territorial sovereignties continued to exist, these were overshadowed by the power and prestige of the German emperor, whose title implied not a terri torial but a national authority. The World War, a world-wide battle of the nations, completed the process, so far as the prin ciple of national sovereignty is concerned ; for Luxembourg, Liech tenstein and Monaco are insignificant exceptions which serve to emphasize the rule. Above all, the disappearance of the Habsburg monarchy, the last great purely territorial dominion, proclaimed the World War as the most stupendous phase of the Revolution which started with the capture of the Bastille. That it was the last phase cannot be said. In their internal affairs the nations are still experimenting in the application of the democratic principles proclaimed by the Revolution, except where—as in most Latin countries—the experiment has conspicuously broken down. As for the social revolution, dreamed of by Robespierre, this has to a large extent been realized even in countries reputed conservative —in universal free education, the duty of the State to provide work or the maintenance of those out of work, and so on. In the matter of international relations, too, some return has been made to the revolutionary ideal of the brotherhood of man ; and the League of Nations represents an attempt to put into the laws the moral truths culled from the works of the philosophers. But the jealous and mutually exclusive sentiment of nationality remains the most fateful legacy of the Revolution, the forces of which for good or evil are not yet spent.