THE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION
The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial misery known as the
Kingdom of France came crashing down on a memorable evening in the month
of August of the year of grace 1789.
On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing emotional fury,
the National Assembly worked itself into a veritable orgy of brotherly
love. Until in a moment of intense excitement the privileged classes
surrendered all those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken
them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared themselves
in favor of those theoretical rights of man which henceforth would be the
foundation-stone for all further attempts at popular self-government.
As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of the feudal system.
An aristocracy which is actually composed of the “aristoi,” of the best
of the most enterprising elements of society, which boldly assumes
leadership and shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance
to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active service and
contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs in diverse departments of
government is only fit to drink tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on
Second.
The old France therefore was dead.
Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.
But it was dead and with it there passed away that most outrageous form
of an invisible government which the Church, ever since the days of
Richelieu, had been able to impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint
Louis.
Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.
Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts and souls of all
honest men and women, it is needless to speak.
The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.
And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in an autocratic form
of government was for good and all to be eradicated from this fair earth.
Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are gone!
And more words to that effect.
Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its many iniquities,
the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal and when it was all over,
behold our old friend Intolerance, wearing a pair of proletarian
pantaloons and his hair brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side
with the public prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.
Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for claiming that
authority maintaining itself solely by the grace of Heaven might
sometimes be in error.
Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the will of the
people need not always and invariably be the will of God.
A ghastly joke!
But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular fancies) with the
blood of a million innocent bystanders.
What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original. One can find
the same idea couched in different if more elegant words in the works of
many of the ancients.
In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, and apparently
there always have been, and most likely there always will be two entirely
different varieties of human beings.
A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the serious
searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive at certain
temperate philosophical conclusions which will place them above and
beyond the common worries of mankind.
But the vast majority of the people are not contented with a mild diet of
spiritual “light wines.” They want something with a kick to it, something
that burns on the tongue, that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit
up and take notice. What that “something” is does not matter very much,
provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications and is served
in a direct and simple fashion and in unlimited quantities.
This fact seems to have been little understood by historians and
this has led to many and serious disappointments. No sooner has an
outraged populace torn down the stronghold of the past (a fact duly and
enthusiastically reported by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it
turns mason, carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the
city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit as vile and
tyrannical as the old one and used for the same purpose of repression and
terror.
The very moment a number of proud nations have at last succeeded in
throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an “infallible man” they
accept the dictates of an “infallible book.”
Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a flunkey, is madly
galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters the deserted palace, puts
on the discarded royal raiment and forthwith commits herself to those
selfsame blunders and cruelties which have just driven her predecessor
into exile.
It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our story and
must be told.
No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible for the
great French upheaval were of the best. The Declaration of the Rights of
Man had laid down the principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed
in the peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not even
his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not disturb the
public order as laid down by the various decrees and laws.
This however did not mean equal rights for all religious denominations.
The Protestant faith henceforth was to be tolerated, Protestants were not
to be annoyed because they worshiped in a different church from their
Catholic neighbors, but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant”
Church of the state.
Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of political
life, knew that this far famed concession was only a half-way measure.
But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn a great social cataclysm into a
one-man revolution, died under the effort and many noblemen and bishops,
repenting of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of August,
were already beginning that policy of obstructionism which was to be of
such fatal consequence to their master the king. And it was not until
two years later in the year 1791 (and exactly two years too late for any
practical purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants and
the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality and were declared
to enjoy the same liberty before the law.
From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed. The constitution
which the representatives of the French people finally bestowed upon
an expectant country insisted that all priests of whatsoever faith
should swear an oath of allegiance to the new form of government and
should regard themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the
school-teachers and postal employees and light-house keepers and customs
officials who were their fellow-citizens.
Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the new constitution
were in direct violation of every solemn agreement that had been
concluded between France and the Holy See since the year 1516. But the
Assembly was in no mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents
and treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this decree
or resign their positions and starve to death. A few bishops and a few
priests accepted what seemed inevitable. They crossed their fingers and
went through the formality of an oath. But by far the greater number,
being honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf out
of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted during so many
years, they began to say mass in deserted stables and to give communion
in pigsties, to preach their sermons behind country hedges and to pay
clandestine visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the
middle of the night.
Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants
had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly
disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the
enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk
of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that
they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly
called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be
accorded those privileges which during the previous three centuries
they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the
Calvinist faith.
The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance
of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite
decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under
the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court,
combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a
panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the
shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of
wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of
September of the year 1792.
From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign
of terror.
The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught
when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were
engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The
explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct
of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the
hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every
honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the
principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a
hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no
one had been able to foresee.
When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it
was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of
warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have
testified.
Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of
politics and economics and social organization. But not until the
historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn
historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark
forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and
travail.
There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light.
There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one
thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a
choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all
experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a
noisy apotheosis of violence.
Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world by way of reason
were either dead or were put to death by the very people whom they had
helped to glory. And with the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots
and the Condorcets out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New
Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s fate. What
a ghastly mess they made of their high mission!
During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out
enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the
very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had
suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere
sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of
incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. Together with a few
others who believed that they could disprove the existence of a personal
God with the help of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy
the Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful task
but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary psychology that the
normal becomes abnormal and the impossible is turned into an every day
occurrence. Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old
Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing Christmas and
Easter; abolishing weeks and months and re-dividing the year into periods
of ten days each with a new pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another
paper pronunciamento which abolished the worship of God and left the
universe without a master.
But not for long.
However eloquently explained and defended within the bare rooms of the
Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and empty void was too repellent to
most citizens to be tolerated for more than a couple of weeks. The old
Deity no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example of Moses
and Mahomet and invent a new one that should suit the demands of the
times?
As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!
Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime a comely
actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek draperies, would fill the bill
perfectly. The lady was found among the dancers of his late Majesty’s
corps de ballet and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to the
high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the loyal followers of
an older faith.
As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries, had stood a
tender watch over all those who had bared the wounds of their soul before
the patient eyes of perfect understanding, she too was gone, hastily
hidden by loving hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned
into mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty, the proud
product of an amateur sculptor and done rather carelessly in white
plaster. But that was not all. Notre Dame had seen other innovations. In
the middle of the choir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple
of Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a throne for
the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl was not holding court and
receiving the worship of her trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy
harbored a “Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry
high the burning flame of world enlightenment.
The “end of time” came before another six months.
On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794 the French people
were officially informed that God had been reëstablished and that the
immortality of the soul was once more a recognized article of faith. On
the eighth of June, the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the
second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques Rousseau) was
officially presented to his eager disciples.
Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address of welcome. He
had reached the highest point of his career. The obscure law clerk from
a third rate country town had become the high priest of the Revolution.
More than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine Théot,
revered by thousands as the true mother of God, had just proclaimed the
forthcoming return of the Messiah and she had even revealed his name.
It was Maximilian Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic
uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing reams of oratory in
which he assured God that from now on all would be well with His little
world.
And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law by which those
suspected of treason and heresy (for once more they were held to be the
same, as in the good old days of the Inquisition) were deprived of all
means of defense, a measure so ably conceived that during the next six
weeks more than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath the
slanting knife of the guillotine.
The rest of his story is only too well known.
As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself held to be
Good (with a capital G) he could, in his quality of a logical fanatic,
not possibly recognize the right of other men, less perfect, to exist on
the same planet with himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a
capital E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the brink
of depopulation.
Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the enemies of
Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate struggle destroyed this
Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.
Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent itself. The
constitution which the French people then adopted recognized the
existence of different denominations and gave them the same rights
and privileges. Officially at least the Republic washed her hands of
all religion. Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an
association, were free to do so but they were obliged to support their
own ministers and priests and recognize the superior rights of the state
and the complete freedom of choice of the individual.
Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have lived peacefully
side by side.
It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat, continues to deny
the principle of a division of state and church (see the decree of Pope
Pius IX of December 8th, 1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back
to power by supporting those political parties who hope to upset the
republican form of government and bring back the monarchy or the empire.
But these battles are usually fought in the private parlors of some
minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodge of a retired general
with an ambitious mother-in-law.
They have thus far provided the funny papers with some excellent material
but they are proving themselves increasingly futile.