Chapter LXXIV: Section V: His History of the French Revolution

Hence, he saw nothing but evil in the French Revolution. He judges it as unjustly as he judges Voltaire, and for the same reasons. He understands our manner of acting no better than our manner of thinking. He looks for Puritan sentiment; and, as he does not find it, he condemns us. The idea of duty, the religious spirit, self-government, the authority of an austere conscience, can alone, in his opinion, reform a corrupt society; and none of all these are to be met with in French society. The philosophy which has produced and guided the Revolution was simply destructive, proclaiming no other gospel but "that a lie cannot be believed! Philosophy knows only this: Her other relief is mainly that in spiritual, supra-sensual matters, no belief is possible." The theory of the Rights of Man, borrowed from Rousseau, is only a logical game, a pedantry almost as opportune as a "Theory of Irregular Verbs." The manners in vogue were the epicurism of Faublas. The morality in vogue was the promise of universal happiness. Incredulity, hollow rant, sensuality, were the mainsprings of this reformation. Men let loose their instincts and overturned the barriers. They replaced corrupt authority by unchecked anarchy. In what could a jacquerie of brutalized peasants, impelled by ecclesiastical arguments, end?

"For ourselves, we answer that French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt, worn-out Authority....[390]

"So thousandfold complex a Society, ready to burst up from its infinite depths; and these men its rulers and healers, without life-rule for themselves--other life-rule than a Gospel according to Jean Jacques! To the wisest of them, what we must call the wisest, man is properly an accident under the sky. Man is without duty round him, except it be to make the Constitution. He is without Heaven above him, or Hell beneath him; he has no God in the world.

"While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the upper, and want and stagnation of the lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain?... What will remain? The five unsatiated senses will remain, the sixth insatiable sense (of vanity); the whole _dœmoniac_ nature of man will remain.

"Man is not what we call a happy animal; his appetite for sweet victual is too enormous.... (He cannot subsist) except by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance."[391]

But set the good beside the evil; put down virtues beside vices. These sceptics believed in demonstrated truth, and would have her alone for mistress. These logicians founded society only on justice, and risked their lives rather than renounce an established theorem. These epicureans embraced in their sympathies entire humanity. These furious men, these workmen, these hungry, threadbare peasants, fought on the frontiers for humanitarian interests and abstract principles. Generosity and enthusiasm abounded in France, as well as in England; acknowledge them under a form which is not English. These men were devoted to abstract truth, as the Puritan to divine truth; they followed philosophy, as the Puritans followed religion; they had for their aim universal salvation, as the Puritans had individual salvation. They fought against evil in society, as the Puritans fought it in the soul. They were generous, as the Puritans were virtuous. They had, like them, a heroism, but sympathetic, sociable, ready to proselytize, which reformed Europe, whilst the English one only served England.