later mediaeval sects and Protestantism there is an essential difference,
that outweighs the points of analogy found in those systems which are
regarded as heralds of the Reformation, and is enough to explain the
vitality of the last in comparison with the others. Whilst Wycliffe and
Hus contradicted certain particulars of the Catholic teaching, Luther
rejected the authority of the Church, and gave to the individual
conscience an independence which was sure to lead to an incessant
resistance. There is a similar difference between the Revolt of the
Netherlands, the Great Rebellion, the War of Independence, or the rising
of Brabant, on the one hand, and the French Revolution on the other.
Before 1789, insurrections were provoked by particular wrongs, and were
justified by definite complaints and by an appeal to principles which
all men acknowledged. New theories were sometimes advanced in the cause
of controversy, but they were accidental, and the great argument against
tyranny was fidelity to the ancient laws. Since the change produced by
the French Revolution, those aspirations which are awakened by the evils
and defects of the social state have come to act as permanent and
energetic forces throughout the civilised world. They are spontaneous
and aggressive, needing no prophet to proclaim, no champion to defend
them, but popular, unreasoning, and almost irresistible. The Revolution
effected this change, partly by its doctrines, partly by the indirect
influence of events. It taught the people to regard their wishes and
wants as the supreme criterion of right. The rapid vicissitudes of
power, in which each party successively appealed to the favour of the
masses as the arbiter of success, accustomed the masses to be arbitrary
as well as insubordinate. The fall of many governments, and the frequent
redistribution of territory, deprived all settlements of the dignity of
permanence. Tradition and prescription ceased to be guardians of
authority; and the arrangements which proceeded from revolutions, from
the triumphs of war, and from treaties of peace, were equally regardless
of established rights. Duty cannot be dissociated from right, and
nations refuse to be controlled by laws which are no protection.
In this condition of the world, theory and action follow close upon each
other, and practical evils easily give birth to opposite systems. In the
realms of free-will, the regularity of natural progress is preserved by
the conflict of extremes. The impulse of the reaction carries men from
one extremity towards another. The pursuit of a remote and ideal object,
which captivates the imagination by its splendour and the reason by its
simplicity, evokes an energy which would not be inspired by a rational,
possible end, limited by many antagonistic claims, and confined to what
is reasonable, practicable, and just. One excess or exaggeration is the
corrective of the other, and error promotes truth, where the masses are
concerned, by counterbalancing a contrary error. The few have not
strength to achieve great changes unaided; the many have not wisdom to
be moved by truth unmixed. Where the disease is various, no particular
definite remedy can meet the wants of all. Only the attraction of an
abstract idea, or of an ideal state, can unite in a common action
multitudes who seek a universal cure for many special evils, and a
common restorative applicable to many different conditions. And hence
false principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just
aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social
life of nations.
Theories of this kind are just, inasmuch as they are provoked by
definite ascertained evils, and undertake their removal. They are useful
in opposition, as a warning or a threat, to modify existing things, and
keep awake the consciousness of wrong. They cannot serve as a basis for
the reconstruction of civil society, as medicine cannot serve for food;
but they may influence it with advantage, because they point out the
direction, though not the measure, in which reform is needed. They
oppose an order of things which is the result of a selfish and violent
abuse of power by the ruling classes, and of artificial restriction on
the natural progress of the world, destitute of an ideal element or a
moral purpose. Practical extremes differ from the theoretical extremes
they provoke, because the first are both arbitrary and violent, whilst
the last, though also revolutionary, are at the same time remedial. In
one case the wrong is voluntary, in the other it is inevitable. This is
the general character of the contest between the existing order and the
subversive theories that deny its legitimacy. There are three principal
theories of this kind, impugning the present distribution of power, of
property, and of territory, and attacking respectively the aristocracy,
the middle class, and the sovereignty. They are the theories of
equality, communism, and nationality. Though sprung from a common
origin, opposing cognate evils, and connected by many links, they did
not appear simultaneously. Rousseau proclaimed the first, Baboeuf the
second, Mazzini the third; and the third is the most recent in its
appearance, the most attractive at the present time, and the richest in
promise of future power.
In the old European system, the rights of nationalities were neither
recognised by governments nor asserted by the people. The interest of
the reigning families, not those of the nations, regulated the
frontiers; and the administration was conducted generally without any
reference to popular desires. Where all liberties were suppressed, the
claims of national independence were necessarily ignored, and a
princess, in the words of Fenelon, carried a monarchy in her wedding
portion. The eighteenth century acquiesced in this oblivion of corporate
rights on the Continent, for the absolutists cared only for the State,
and the liberals only for the individual. The Church, the nobles, and
the nation had no place in the popular theories of the age; and they
devised none in their own defence, for they were not openly attacked.
The aristocracy retained its privileges, and the Church her property;
and the dynastic interest, which overruled the natural inclination of
the nations and destroyed their independence, nevertheless maintained
their integrity. The national sentiment was not wounded in its most
sensitive part. To dispossess a sovereign of his hereditary crown, and
to annex his dominions, would have been held to inflict an injury upon
all monarchies, and to furnish their subjects with a dangerous example,
by depriving royalty of its inviolable character. In time of war, as
there was no national cause at stake, there was no attempt to rouse
national feeling. The courtesy of the rulers towards each other was
proportionate to the contempt for the lower orders. Compliments passed
between the commanders of hostile armies; there was no bitterness, and
no excitement; battles were fought with the pomp and pride of a parade.
The art of war became a slow and learned game. The monarchies were
united not only by a natural community of interests, but by family
alliances. A marriage contract sometimes became the signal for an
interminable war, whilst family connections often set a barrier to
ambition. After the wars of religion came to an end in 1648, the only
wars were those which were waged for an inheritance or a dependency, or
against countries whose system of government exempted them from the
common law of dynastic States, and made them not only unprotected but
obnoxious. These countries were England and Holland, until Holland
ceased to be a republic, and until, in England, the defeat of the
Jacobites in the forty-five terminated the struggle for the Crown. There
was one country, however, which still continued to be an exception; one
monarch whose place was not admitted in the comity of kings.
Poland did not possess those securities for stability which were
supplied by dynastic connections and the theory of legitimacy, wherever
a crown could be obtained by marriage or inheritance. A monarch without
royal blood, a crown bestowed by the nation, were an anomaly and an
outrage in that age of dynastic absolutism. The country was excluded
from the European system by the nature of its institutions. It excited a
cupidity which could not be satisfied. It gave the reigning families of
Europe no hope of permanently strengthening themselves by intermarriage
with its rulers, or of obtaining it by bequest or by inheritance. The
Habsburgs had contested the possession of Spain and the Indies with the
French Bourbons, of Italy with the Spanish Bourbons, of the empire with
the house of Wittelsbach, of Silesia with the house of Hohenzollern.
There had been wars between rival houses for half the territories of
Italy and Germany. But none could hope to redeem their losses or
increase their power in a country to which marriage and descent gave no
claim. Where they could not permanently inherit they endeavoured, by
intrigues, to prevail at each election, and after contending in support
of candidates who were their partisans, the neighbours at last appointed
an instrument for the final demolition of the Polish State. Till then no
nation had been deprived of its political existence by the Christian
Powers, and whatever disregard had been shown for national interests and
sympathies, some care had been taken to conceal the wrong by a
hypocritical perversion of law. But the partition of Poland was an act
of wanton violence, committed in open defiance not only of popular
feeling but of public law. For the first time in modern history a great
State was suppressed, and a whole nation divided among its enemies.
This famous measure, the most revolutionary act of the old absolutism,
awakened the theory of nationality in Europe, converting a dormant right
into an aspiration, and a sentiment into a political claim. "No wise or
honest man," wrote Edmund Burke, "can approve of that partition, or can
contemplate it without prognosticating great mischief from it to all
countries at some future time."[327] Thenceforward there was a nation
demanding to be united in a State,--a soul, as it were, wandering in
search of a body in which to begin life over again; and, for the first
time, a cry was heard that the arrangement of States was unjust--that
their limits were unnatural, and that a whole people was deprived of its
right to constitute an independent community. Before that claim could be
efficiently asserted against the overwhelming power of its
opponents,--before it gained energy, after the last partition, to
overcome the influence of long habits of submission, and of the contempt
which previous disorders had brought upon Poland,--the ancient European
system was in ruins, and a new world was rising in its place.
The old despotic policy which made the Poles its prey had two
adversaries,--the spirit of English liberty, and the doctrines of that
revolution which destroyed the French monarchy with its own weapons; and
these two contradicted in contrary ways the theory that nations have no
collective rights. At the present day, the theory of nationality is not
only the most powerful auxiliary of revolution, but its actual substance
in the movements of the last three years. This, however, is a recent
alliance, unknown to the first French Revolution. The modern theory of
nationality arose partly as a legitimate consequence, partly as a
reaction against it. As the system which overlooked national division
was opposed by liberalism in two forms, the French and the English, so
the system which insists upon them proceeds from two distinct sources,
and exhibits the character either of 1688 or of 1789. When the French
people abolished the authorities under which it lived, and became its
own master, France was in danger of dissolution: for the common will is
difficult to ascertain, and does not readily agree. "The laws," said
Vergniaud, in the debate on the sentence of the king, "are obligatory
only as the presumptive will of the people, which retains the right of
approving or condemning them. The instant it manifests its wish the work
of the national representation, the law, must disappear." This doctrine
resolved society into its natural elements, and threatened to break up
the country into as many republics as there were communes. For true
republicanism is the principle of self-government in the whole and in
all the parts. In an extensive country, it can prevail only by the union
of several independent communities in a single confederacy, as in
Greece, in Switzerland, in the Netherlands, and in America; so that a
large republic not founded on the federal principle must result in the
government of a single city, like Rome and Paris, and, in a less degree,
Athens, Berne, and Amsterdam; or, in other words, a great democracy must
either sacrifice self-government to unity, or preserve it by federalism.
The France of history fell together with the French State, which was the
growth of centuries. The old sovereignty was destroyed. The local
authorities were looked upon with aversion and alarm. The new central
authority needed to be established on a new principle of unity. The
state of nature, which was the ideal of society, was made the basis of
the nation; descent was put in the place of tradition, and the French
people was regarded as a physical product: an ethnological, not
historic, unit. It was assumed that a unity existed separate from the
representation and the government, wholly independent of the past, and
capable at any moment of expressing or of changing its mind. In the
words of Sieyes, it was no longer France, but some unknown country to
which the nation was transported. The central power possessed authority,
inasmuch as it obeyed the whole, and no divergence was permitted from
the universal sentiment. This power, endowed with volition, was
personified in the Republic One and Indivisible. The title signified
that a part could not speak or act for the whole,--that there was a
power supreme over the State, distinct from, and independent of, its
members; and it expressed, for the first time in history, the notion of
an abstract nationality. In this manner the idea of the sovereignty of
the people, uncontrolled by the past, gave birth to the idea of
nationality independent of the political influence of history. It sprang
from the rejection of the two authorities,--of the State and of the
past. The kingdom of France was, geographically as well as politically,
the product of a long series of events, and the same influences which
built up the State formed the territory. The Revolution repudiated alike
the agencies to which France owed her boundaries and those to which she
owed her government. Every effaceable trace and relic of national
history was carefully wiped away,--the system of administration, the
physical divisions of the country, the classes of society, the
corporations, the weights and measures, the calendar. France was no
longer bounded by the limits she had received from the condemned
influence of her history; she could recognise only those which were set
by nature. The definition of the nation was borrowed from the material
world, and, in order to avoid a loss of territory, it became not only an
abstraction but a fiction.
There was a principle of nationality in the ethnological character of
the movement, which is the source of the common observation that
revolution is more frequent in Catholic than in Protestant countries. It
is, in fact, more frequent in the Latin than in the Teutonic world,
because it depends partly on a national impulse, which is only awakened
where there is an alien element, the vestige of a foreign dominion, to
expel. Western Europe has undergone two conquests--one by the Romans and
one by the Germans, and twice received laws from the invaders. Each time
it rose again against the victorious race; and the two great reactions,
while they differ according to the different characters of the two
conquests, have the phenomenon of imperialism in common. The Roman
republic laboured to crush the subjugated nations into a homogeneous and
obedient mass; but the increase which the proconsular authority obtained
in the process subverted the republican government, and the reaction of
the provinces against Rome assisted in establishing the empire The
Caesarean system gave an unprecedented freedom to the dependencies, and
raised them to a civil equality which put an end to the dominion of race
over race and of class over class. The monarchy was hailed as a refuge
from the pride and cupidity of the Roman people; and the love of
equality, the hatred of nobility, and the tolerance of despotism
implanted by Rome became, at least in Gaul, the chief feature of the
national character. But among the nations whose vitality had been broken
down by the stern republic, not one retained the materials necessary to
enjoy independence, or to develop a new history. The political faculty
which organises states and finds society in a moral order was exhausted,
and the Christian doctors looked in vain over the waste of ruins for a
people by whose aid the Church might survive the decay of Rome. A new
element of national life was brought to that declining world by the
enemies who destroyed it. The flood of barbarians settled over it for a
season, and then subsided; and when the landmarks of civilisation
appeared once more, it was found that the soil had been impregnated with
a fertilising and regenerating influence, and that the inundation had
laid the germs of future states and of a new society. The political
sense and energy came with the new blood, and was exhibited in the power
exercised by the younger race upon the old, and in the establishment of
a graduated freedom. Instead of universal equal rights, the actual
enjoyment of which is necessarily contingent on, and commensurate with,
power, the rights of the people were made dependent on a variety of
conditions, the first of which was the distribution of property. Civil
society became a classified organism instead of a formless combination
of atoms, and the feudal system gradually arose.
Roman Gaul had so thoroughly adopted the ideas of absolute authority and
undistinguished equality during the five centuries between Caesar and
Clovis, that the people could never be reconciled to the new system.
Feudalism remained a foreign importation, and the feudal aristocracy an
alien race, and the common people of France sought protection against
both in the Roman jurisprudence and the power of the crown. The
development of absolute monarchy by the help of democracy is the one
constant character of French history. The royal power, feudal at first,
and limited by the immunities and the great vassals, became more
popular as it grew more absolute; while the suppression of aristocracy,
the removal of the intermediate authorities, was so particularly the
object of the nation, that it was more energetically accomplished after
the fall of the throne. The monarchy which had been engaged from the
thirteenth century in curbing the nobles, was at last thrust aside by
the democracy, because it was too dilatory in the work, and was unable
to deny its own origin and effectually ruin the class from which it
sprang. All those things which constitute the peculiar character of the
French Revolution,--the demand for equality, the hatred of nobility and
feudalism, and of the Church which was connected with them, the constant
reference to pagan examples, the suppression of monarchy, the new code
of law, the breach with tradition, and the substitution of an ideal
system for everything that had proceeded from the mixture and mutual
action of the races,--all these exhibit the common type of a reaction
against the effects of the Frankish invasion. The hatred of royalty was
less than the hatred of aristocracy; privileges were more detested than
tyranny; and the king perished because of the origin of his authority
rather than because of its abuse. Monarchy unconnected with aristocracy
became popular in France, even when most uncontrolled; whilst the
attempt to reconstitute the throne, and to limit and fence it with its
peers, broke down, because the old Teutonic elements on which it
relied--hereditary nobility, primogeniture, and privilege--were no
longer tolerated. The substance of the ideas of 1789 is not the
limitation of the sovereign power, but the abrogation of intermediate
powers. These powers, and the classes which enjoyed them, come in Latin
Europe from a barbarian origin; and the movement which calls itself
liberal is essentially national. If liberty were its object, its means
would be the establishment of great independent authorities not derived
from the State, and its model would be England. But its object is
equality; and it seeks, like France in 1789, to cast out the elements of
inequality which were introduced by the Teutonic race. This is the
object which Italy and Spain have had in common with France, and herein
consists the natural league of the Latin nations.
This national element in the movement was not understood by the
revolutionary leaders. At first, their doctrine appeared entirely
contrary to the idea of nationality. They taught that certain general
principles of government were absolutely right in all States; and they
asserted in theory the unrestricted freedom of the individual, and the
supremacy of the will over every external necessity or obligation. This
is in apparent contradiction to the national theory, that certain
natural forces ought to determine the character, the form, and the
policy of the State, by which a kind of fate is put in the place of
freedom. Accordingly the national sentiment was not developed directly
out of the revolution in which it was involved, but was exhibited first
in resistance to it, when the attempt to emancipate had been absorbed in
the desire to subjugate, and the republic had been succeeded by the
empire. Napoleon called a new power into existence by attacking
nationality in Russia, by delivering it in Italy, by governing in
defiance of it in Germany and Spain. The sovereigns of these countries
were deposed or degraded; and a system of administration was introduced
which was French in its origin, its spirit, and its instruments. The
people resisted the change. The movement against it was popular and
spontaneous, because the rulers were absent or helpless; and it was
national, because it was directed against foreign institutions. In
Tyrol, in Spain, and afterwards in Prussia, the people did not receive
the impulse from the government, but undertook of their own accord to
cast out the armies and the ideas of revolutionised France. Men were
made conscious of the national element of the revolution by its
conquests, not in its rise. The three things which the Empire most
openly oppressed--religion, national independence, and political
liberty--united in a short-lived league to animate the great uprising by
which Napoleon fell. Under the influence of that memorable alliance a
political spirit was called forth on the Continent, which clung to
freedom and abhorred revolution, and sought to restore, to develop, and
to reform the decayed national institutions. The men who proclaimed
these ideas, Stein and Goerres, Humboldt, Mueller, and De Maistre,[328]
were as hostile to Bonapartism as to the absolutism of the old
governments, and insisted on the national rights, which had been invaded
equally by both, and which they hoped to restore by the destruction of
the French supremacy. With the cause that triumphed at Waterloo the
friends of the Revolution had no sympathy, for they had learned to
identify their doctrine with the cause of France. The Holland House
Whigs in England, the Afrancesados in Spain, the Muratists in Italy, and
the partisans of the Confederation of the Rhine, merging patriotism in
their revolutionary affections, regretted the fall of the French power,
and looked with alarm at those new and unknown forces which the War of
Deliverance had evoked, and which were as menacing to French liberalism
as to French supremacy.