Now what general notion does the ordinary English boy, thus taught to
utter one ignorance in one of two accents, get and keep through life
about the French Revolution? It is the notion of the English House of
Commons with an enormous Radical majority on one side of the table and
a small Tory minority on the other; the majority voting solid for a
Republic, the minority voting solid for a Monarchy; two teams tramping
through two lobbies with no difference between their methods and ours,
except that (owing to some habit peculiar to Gaul) the brief intervals
were brightened by a riot or a massacre, instead of by a whisky and soda
and a Marconi tip. Novels are much more reliable than histories in such
matters. For though an English novel about France does not tell the
truth about France, it does tell the truth about England; and more than
half the histories never tell the truth about anything. And popular
fiction, I think, bears witness to the general English impression. The
French Revolution is a snap division with an unusual turnover of votes.
On the one side stand a king and queen who are good but weak, surrounded
by nobles with rapiers drawn; some of whom are good, many of whom are
wicked, all of whom are good-looking. Against these there is a formless
mob of human beings, wearing red caps and seemingly insane, who all
blindly follow ruffians who are also rhetoricians; some of whom die
repentant and others unrepentant towards the end of the fourth act.
The leaders of this boiling mass of all men melted into one are called
Mirabeau, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, and so on. And it is conceded that
their united frenzy may have been forced on them by the evils of the old
regime.
That, I think, is the commonest English view of the French Revolution;
and it will not survive the reading of two pages of any real speech or
letter of the period. These human beings were human; varied, complex and
inconsistent. But the rich Englishman, ignorant of revolutions, would
hardly believe you if you told him some of the common human subtleties
of the case. Tell him that Robespierre threw the red cap in the dirt in
disgust, while the king had worn it with a broad grin, so to speak; tell
him that Danton, the fierce founder of the Republic of the Terror, said
quite sincerely to a noble, “I am more monarchist than you;” tell him
that the Terror really seems to have been brought to an end chiefly by
the efforts of people who particularly wanted to go on with it--and he
will not believe these things. He will not believe them because he has
no humility, and therefore no realism. He has never been inside himself;
and so could never be inside another man. The truth is that in the
French affair everybody occupied an individual position. Every man
talked sincerely, if not because he was sincere, then because he was
angry. Robespierre talked even more about God than about the Republic
because he cared even more about God than about the Republic. Danton
talked even more about France than about the Republic because he cared
even more about France than about the Republic. Marat talked more about
Humanity than either, because that physician (though himself somewhat
needing a physician) really cared about it. The nobles were divided,
each man from the next. The attitude of the king was quite different
from the attitude of the queen; certainly much more different than any
differences between our Liberals and Tories for the last twenty years.
And it will sadden _some_ of my friends to remember that it was the king
who was the Liberal and the queen who was the Tory. There were not two
people, I think, in that most practical crisis who stood in precisely
the same attitude towards the situation. And that is why, between them,
they saved Europe. It is when you really perceive the unity of mankind
that you really perceive its variety. It is not a flippancy, it is a
very sacred truth, to say that when men really understand that they are
brothers they instantly begin to fight.