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LECTURES
ON THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION
MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
LONDON . BOMBAY . CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK . BOSTON . CHICAGO
ATLANTA . SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
LECTURES
ON THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION
BY
JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON
First Baron ACTON
D.C.L., LL.D., ETC. ETC.
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
EDITED BY
JOHN NEVILLE FIGGIS, C.R., Litt.D.
HONORARY FELLOW OF ST. CATHARINE'S COLLEGE
AND
REGINALD VERE LAURENCE, M.A.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1910
PREFATORY NOTE
The following Lectures were delivered by Lord Acton as Regius
Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in the academical years
1895-96, 1896-97, 1897-98, 1898-99. The French Revolution, 1789-95,
was in those years one of the special subjects set for the Historical
Tripos, and this determined the scope of the course. In addition some
discussion of the literature of the Revolution generally took place
either in a conversation class or as an additional lecture. Such
connected fragments of these as remain have been printed as an
appendix. For the titles of the Lectures the editors are responsible.
J. N. F.
R. V. L.
_August 10, 1910_
CONTENTS
LECT. PAGE
I. The Heralds of the Revolution 1
II. The Influence of America 20
III. The Summons of the States-General 39
IV. The Meeting of the States-General 57
V. The Tennis-Court Oath 68
VI. The Fall of the Bastille 77
VII. The Fourth of August 94
VIII. The Constitutional Debates 109
IX. The March to Versailles 126
X. Mirabeau 141
XI. Sieyes and the Constitution Civile 159
XII. The Flight to Varennes 174
XIII. The Feuillants and the War 193
XIV. Dumouriez 210
XV. The Catastrophe of Monarchy 224
XVI. The Execution of the King 240
XVII. The Fall of the Gironde 256
XVIII. The Reign of Terror 269
XIX. Robespierre 284
XX. La Vendee 301
XXI. The European War 317
XXII. After the Terror 331
Appendix: The Literature of the Revolution 345
Index 375
I
THE HERALDS OF THE REVOLUTION
The revenue of France was near twenty millions when Lewis XVI.,
finding it inadequate, called upon the nation for supply. In a single
lifetime it rose to far more than one hundred millions, while the
national income grew still more rapidly; and this increase was wrought
by a class to whom the ancient monarchy denied its best rewards, and
whom it deprived of power in the country they enriched. As their
industry effected change in the distribution of property, and wealth
ceased to be the prerogative of a few, the excluded majority perceived
that their disabilities rested on no foundation of right and justice,
and were unsupported by reasons of State. They proposed that the
prizes in the Government, the Army, and the Church should be given to
merit among the active and necessary portion of the people, and that
no privilege injurious to them should be reserved for the unprofitable
minority. Being nearly an hundred to one, they deemed that they were
virtually the substance of the nation, and they claimed to govern
themselves with a power proportioned to their numbers. They demanded
that the State should be reformed, that the ruler should be their
agent, not their master.
That is the French Revolution. To see that it is not a meteor from the
unknown, but the product of historic influences which, by their union
were efficient to destroy, and by their division powerless to
construct, we must follow for a moment the procession of ideas that
went before, and bind it to the law of continuity and the operation
of constant forces.
If France failed where other nations have succeeded, and if the
passage from the feudal and aristocratic forms of society to the
industrial and democratic was attended by convulsions, the cause was
not in the men of that day, but in the ground on which they stood. As
long as the despotic kings were victorious abroad, they were accepted
at home. The first signals of revolutionary thinking lurk dimly among
the oppressed minorities during intervals of disaster. The Jansenists
were loyal and patient; but their famous jurist Domat was a
philosopher, and is remembered as the writer who restored the
supremacy of reason in the chaotic jurisprudence of the time. He had
learnt from St. Thomas, a great name in the school he belonged to,
that legislation ought to be for the people and by the people, that
the cashiering of bad kings may be not only a right but a duty. He
insisted that law shall proceed from common sense, not from custom,
and shall draw its precepts from an eternal code. The principle of the
higher law signifies Revolution. No government founded on positive
enactments only can stand before it, and it points the way to that
system of primitive, universal, and indefeasible rights which the
lawyers of the Assembly, descending from Domat, prefixed to their
constitution.
Under the edict of Nantes the Protestants were decided royalists; so
that, even after the Revocation, Bayle, the apostle of Toleration,
retained his loyalty in exile at Rotterdam. His enemy, Jurieu, though
intolerant as a divine, was liberal in his politics, and contracted in
the neighbourhood of William of Orange the temper of a continental
Whig. He taught that sovereignty comes from the people and reverts to
the people. The Crown forfeits powers it has made ill use of. The
rights of the nation cannot be forfeited. The people alone possess an
authority which is legitimate without conditions, and their acts are
valid even when they are wrong. The most telling of Jurieu's seditious
propositions, preserved in the transparent amber of Bossuet's reply,
shared the immortality of a classic, and in time contributed to the
doctrine that the democracy is irresponsible and must have its way.
Maultrot, the best ecclesiastical lawyer of the day, published three
volumes in 1790 on the power of the people over kings, in which, with
accurate research among sources very familiar to him and to nobody
else, he explained how the Canon Law approves the principles of 1688
and rejects the modern invention of divine right. His book explains
still better the attitude of the clergy in the Revolution, and their
brief season of popularity.
The true originator of the opposition in literature was Fenelon. He
was neither an innovating reformer nor a discoverer of new truth; but
as a singularly independent and most intelligent witness, he was the
first who saw through the majestic hypocrisy of the court, and knew
that France was on the road to ruin. The revolt of conscience began
with him before the glory of the monarchy was clouded over. His views
grew from an extraordinary perspicacity and refinement in the estimate
of men. He learnt to refer the problem of government, like the conduct
of private life, to the mere standard of morals, and extended further
than any one the plain but hazardous practice of deciding all things
by the exclusive precepts of enlightened virtue. If he did not know
all about policy and international science, he could always tell what
would be expected of a hypothetically perfect man. Fenelon feels like
a citizen of Christian Europe, but he pursues his thoughts apart from
his country or his church, and his deepest utterances are in the mouth
of pagans. He desired to be alike true to his own beliefs, and
gracious towards those who dispute them. He approved neither the
deposing power nor the punishment of error, and declared that the
highest need of the Church was not victory but liberty. Through his
friends, Fleury and Chevreuse, he favoured the recall of the
Protestants, and he advised a general toleration. He would have the
secular power kept aloof from ecclesiastical concerns, because
protection leads to religious servitude and persecution to religious
hypocrisy. There were moments when his steps seemed to approach the
border of the undiscovered land where Church and State are parted.
He has written that a historian ought to be neutral between other
countries and his own, and he expected the same discipline in
politicians, as patriotism cannot absolve a man from his duty to
mankind. Therefore no war can be just, unless a war to which we are
compelled in the sole cause of freedom. Fenelon wished that France
should surrender the ill-gotten conquests of which she was so proud,
and especially that she should withdraw from Spain. He declared that
the Spaniards were degenerate and imbecile, but that nothing could
make that right which was contrary to the balance of power and the
security of nations. Holland seemed to him the hope of Europe, and he
thought the allies justified in excluding the French dynasty from
Spain for the same reason that no claim of law could have made it
right that Philip II. should occupy England. He hoped that his country
would be thoroughly humbled, for he dreaded the effects of success on
the temperament of the victorious French. He deemed it only fair that
Lewis should be compelled to dethrone his grandson with his own guilty
hand.
In the judgment of Fenelon, power is poison; and as kings are nearly
always bad, they ought not to govern, but only to execute the law. For
it is the mark of barbarians to obey precedent and custom. Civilised
society must be regulated by a solid code. Nothing but a constitution
can avert arbitrary power. The despotism of Lewis XIV. renders him
odious and contemptible, and is the cause of all the evils which the
country suffers. If the governing power which rightfully belonged to
the nation was restored, it would save itself by its own exertion; but
absolute authority irreparably saps its foundations, and is bringing
on a revolution by which it will not be moderated, but utterly
destroyed. Although Fenelon has no wish to sacrifice either the
monarchy or the aristocracy, he betrays sympathy with several
tendencies of the movement which he foresaw with so much alarm. He
admits the state of nature, and thinks civil society not the primitive
condition of man, but a result of the passage from savage life to
husbandry. He would transfer the duties of government to local and
central assemblies; and he demands entire freedom of trade, and
education provided by law, because children belong to the State first
and to the family afterwards. He does not resign the hope of making
men good by act of parliament, and his belief in public institutions
as a means of moulding individual character brings him nearly into
touch with a distant future.
He is the Platonic founder of revolutionary thinking. Whilst his real
views were little known, he became a popular memory; but some
complained that his force was centrifugal, and that a church can no
more be preserved by suavity and distinction than a state by liberty
and justice. Lewis XVI., we are often told, perished in expiation of
the sins of his forefathers. He perished, not because the power he
inherited from them had been carried to excess, but because it had
been discredited and undermined. One author of this discredit was
Fenelon. Until he came, the ablest men, Bossuet and even Bayle,
revered the monarchy. Fenelon struck it at the zenith, and treated
Lewis XIV. in all his grandeur more severely than the disciples of
Voltaire treated Lewis XV. in all his degradation. The season of scorn
and shame begins with him. The best of his later contemporaries
followed his example, and laid the basis of opposing criticism on
motives of religion. They were the men whom Cardinal Dubois describes
as dreamers of the same dreams as the chimerical archbishop of
Cambray. Their influence fades away before the great change that came
over France about the middle of the century.
From that time unbelief so far prevailed that even men who were not
professed assailants, as Montesquieu, Condillac, Turgot, were
estranged from Christianity. Politically, the consequence was this:
men who did not attribute any deep significance to church questions
never acquired definite notions on Church and State, never seriously
examined under what conditions religion may be established or
disestablished, endowed or disendowed, never even knew whether there
exists any general solution, or any principle by which problems of
that kind are decided. This defect of knowledge became a fact of
importance at a turning-point in the Revolution. The theory of the
relations between states and churches is bound up with the theory of
Toleration, and on that subject the eighteenth century scarcely rose
above an intermittent, embarrassed, and unscientific view. For
religious liberty is composed of the properties both of religion and
of liberty, and one of its factors never became an object of
disinterested observation among actual leaders of opinion. They
preferred the argument of doubt to the argument of certitude, and
sought to defeat intolerance by casting out revelation as they had
defeated the persecution of witches by casting out the devil. There
remained a flaw in their liberalism, for liberty apart from belief is
liberty with a good deal of the substance taken out of it. The problem
is less complicated and the solution less radical and less profound.
Already, then, there were writers who held somewhat superficially the
conviction, which Tocqueville made a corner-stone, that nations that
have not the self-governing force of religion within them are
unprepared for freedom.
The early notions of reform moved on French lines, striving to utilise
the existing form of society, to employ the parliamentary aristocracy,
to revive the States-General and the provincial assemblies. But the
scheme of standing on the ancient ways, and raising a new France on
the substructure of the old, brought out the fact that whatever growth
of institutions there once had been had been stunted and stood still.
If the mediaeval polity had been fitted to prosper, its fruit must be
gathered from other countries, where the early notions had been
pursued far ahead. The first thing to do was to cultivate the foreign
example; and with that what we call the eighteenth century began. The
English superiority, proclaimed first by Voltaire, was further
demonstrated by Montesquieu. For England had recently created a
government which was stronger than the institutions that had stood on
antiquity. Founded upon fraud and treason, it had yet established the
security of law more firmly than it had ever existed under the system
of legitimacy, of prolonged inheritance, and of religious sanction. It
flourished on the unaccustomed belief that theological dissensions
need not detract from the power of the State, while political
dissensions are the very secret of its prosperity. The men of
questionable character who accomplished the change and had governed
for the better part of sixty years, had successfully maintained public
order, in spite of conspiracy and rebellion; they had built up an
enormous system of national credit, and had been victorious in
continental war. The Jacobite doctrine, which was the basis of
European monarchy, had been backed by the arms of France, and had
failed to shake the newly planted throne. A great experiment had been
crowned by a great discovery. A novelty that defied the wisdom of
centuries had made good its footing, and revolution had become a
principle of stability more sure than tradition.
Montesquieu undertook to make the disturbing fact avail in political
science. He valued it because it reconciled him with monarchy. He had
started with the belief that kings are an evil, and not a necessary
evil, and that their time was running short. His visit to Walpolean
England taught him a plan by which they might be reprieved. He still
confessed that a republic is the reign of virtue; and by virtue he
meant love of equality and renunciation of self. But he had seen a
monarchy that throve by corruption. He said that the distinctive
principle of monarchy is not virtue but honour, which he once
described as a contrivance to enable men of the world to commit almost
every offence with impunity. The praise of England was made less
injurious to French patriotism by the famous theory that explains
institutions and character by the barometer and the latitude.
Montesquieu looked about him, and abroad, but not far ahead. His
admirable skill in supplying reason for every positive fact sometimes
confounds the cause which produces with the argument that defends. He
knows so many pleas for privilege that he almost overlooks the class
that has none; and having no friendship for the clergy, he approves
their immunities. He thinks that aristocracy alone can preserve
monarchies, and makes England more free than any commonwealth. He lays
down the great conservative maxim, that success generally depends on
knowing the time it will take; and the most purely Whig maxim in his
works, that the duty of a citizen is a crime when it obscures the duty
of man, is Fenelon's. His liberty is of a Gothic type, and not
insatiable. But the motto of his work, _Prolem sine matre creatam_,
was intended to signify that the one thing wanting was liberty; and he
had views on taxation, equality, and the division of powers that gave
him a momentary influence in 1789. His warning that a legislature may
be more dangerous than the executive remained unheard. The _Esprit des
lois_ had lost ground in 1767, during the ascendancy of Rousseau. The
mind of the author moved within the conditions of society familiar to
him, and he did not heed the coming democracy. He assured Hume that
there would be no revolution, because the nobles were without civic
courage.
There was more divination in d'Argenson, who was Minister of Foreign
Affairs in 1745, and knew politics from the inside. Less acquiescent
than his brilliant contemporary, he was perpetually contriving schemes
of fundamental change, and is the earliest writer from whom we can
extract the system of 1789. Others before him had perceived the
impending revolution; but d'Argenson foretold that it would open with
the slaughter of priests in the streets of Paris. Thirty-eight years
later these words came true at the gate of St. Germain's Abbey. As the
supporter of the Pretender he was quite uninfluenced by admiration for
England, and imputed, not to the English Deists and Whigs but to the
Church and her divisions and intolerance, the unbelieving spirit that
threatened both Church and State. It was conventionally understood on
the Continent that 1688 had been an uprising of Nonconformists, and a
Whig was assumed to be a Presbyterian down to the death of Anne. It
was easy to infer that a more violent theological conflict would lead
to a more violent convulsion. As early as 1743 his terrible foresight
discerns that the State is going to pieces, and its doom was so
certain that he began to think of a refuge under other masters. He
would have deposed the noble, the priest, and the lawyer, and given
their power to the masses. Although the science of politics was in its
infancy, he relied on the dawning enlightenment to establish rational
liberty, and the equality between classes and religions which is the
perfection of politics. The world ought to be governed not by
parchment and vested rights, but by plain reason, which proceeds from
the complex to the simple, and will sweep away all that interposes
between the State and the democracy, giving to each part of the nation
the management of its own affairs. He is eager to change everything,
except the monarchy which alone can change all else. A deliberative
assembly does not rise above the level of its average members. It is
neither very foolish nor very wise. All might be well if the king made
himself the irresistible instrument of philosophy and justice, and
wrought the reform. But his king was Lewis XV. D'Argenson saw so
little that was worthy to be preserved that he did not shrink from
sweeping judgments and abstract propositions. By his rationalism, and
his indifference to the prejudice of custom and the claim of
possession; by his maxim that every man may be presumed to understand
the things in which his own interest and responsibility are involved;
by his zeal for democracy, equality, and simplicity, and his dislike
of intermediate authorities, he belongs to a generation later than his
own. He heralded events without preparing them, for the best of all he
wrote only became known in our time.
Whilst Montesquieu, at the height of his fame as the foremost of
living writers, was content to contemplate the past, there was a
student in the Paris seminary who taught men to fix hope and
endeavour on the future, and led the world at twenty-three. Turgot,
when he proclaimed that upward growth and progress is the law of human
life, was studying to become a priest. To us, in an age of science, it
has become difficult to imagine Christianity without the attribute of
development and the faculty of improving society as well as souls. But
the idea was acquired slowly. Under the burden of sin, men accustomed
themselves to the consciousness of degeneracy; each generation
confessed that they were unworthy children of their parents, and
awaited with impatience the approaching end. From Lucretius and Seneca
to Pascal and Leibniz we encounter a few dispersed and unsupported
passages, suggesting advance towards perfection, and the flame that
brightens as it moves from hand to hand; but they were without mastery
or radiance. Turgot at once made the idea habitual and familiar, and
it became a pervading force in thoughtful minds, whilst the new
sciences arose to confirm it. He imparted a deeper significance to
history, giving it unity of tendency and direction, constancy where
there had been motion, and development instead of change. The progress
he meant was moral as much as intellectual; and as he professed to
think that the rogues of his day would have seemed sanctified models
to an earlier century, he made his calculations without counting the
wickedness of men. His analysis left unfathomed depths for future
explorers, for Lessing and still more for Hegel; but he taught mankind
to expect that the future would be unlike the past, that it would be
better, and that the experience of ages may instruct and warn, but
cannot guide or control. He is eminently a benefactor to historical
study; but he forged a weapon charged with power to abolish the
product of history and the existing order. By the hypothesis of
progress, the new is always gaining on the old; history is the
embodiment of imperfection, and escape from history became the
watchword of the coming day. Condorcet, the master's pupil, thought
that the world might be emancipated by burning its records.
Turgot was too discreet for such an excess, and he looked to history
for the demonstration of his law. He had come upon it in his
theological studies. He renounced them soon after, saying that he
could not wear a mask. When Guizot called Lamennais a malefactor,
because he threw off his cassock and became a freethinker, Scherer,
whose course had been some way parallel, observed: "He little knows
how much it costs." The abrupt transition seems to have been
accomplished by Turgot without a struggle. The _Encyclopaedia_, which
was the largest undertaking since the invention of printing, came out
at that time, and Turgot wrote for it. But he broke off, refusing to
be connected with a party professedly hostile to revealed religion;
and he rejected the declamatory paradoxes of Diderot and Raynal. He
found his home among the Physiocrats, of all the groups the one that
possessed the most compact body of consistent views, and who already
knew most of the accepted doctrines of political economy, although
they ended by making way for Adam Smith. They are of supreme
importance to us, because they founded political science on the
economic science which was coming into existence. Harrington, a
century before, had seen that the art of government can be reduced to
system; but the French economists precede all men in this, that
holding a vast collection of combined and verified truths on matters
contiguous to politics and belonging to their domain, they extended it
to the whole, and governed the constitution by the same fixed
principles that governed the purse. They said: A man's most sacred
property is his labour. It is anterior even to the right of property,
for it is the possession of those who own nothing else. Therefore he
must be free to make the best use of it he can. The interference of
one man with another, of society with its members, of the state with
the subject, must be brought down to the lowest dimension. Power
intervenes only to restrict intervention, to guard the individual from
oppression, that is from regulation in an interest not his own. Free
labour and its derivative free trade are the first conditions of
legitimate government. Let things fall into their natural order, let
society govern itself, and the sovereign function of the State will be
to protect nature in the execution of her own law. Government must not
be arbitrary, but it must be powerful enough to repress arbitrary
action in others. If the supreme power is needlessly limited, the
secondary powers will run riot and oppress. Its supremacy will bear no
check. The problem is to enlighten the ruler, not to restrain him; and
one man is more easily enlightened than many. Government by
opposition, by balance and control, is contrary to principle; whereas
absolutism might be requisite to the attainment of their higher
purpose. Nothing less than concentrated power could overcome the
obstacles to such beneficent reforms as they meditated. Men who sought
only the general good must wound every distinct and separate interest
of class, and would be mad to break up the only force that they could
count upon, and thus to throw away the means of preventing the evils
that must follow if things were left to the working of opinion and the
feeling of masses. They had no love for absolute power in itself, but
they computed that, if they had the use of it for five years, France
would be free. They distinguished an arbitrary monarch and the
irresistible but impersonal state.
It was the era of repentant monarchy. Kings had become the first of
public servants, executing, for the good of the people, what the
people were unable to do for themselves; and there was a reforming
movement on foot which led to many instances of prosperous and
intelligent administration. To men who knew what unutterable suffering
and wrong was inflicted by bad laws, and who lived in terror of the
uneducated and inorganic masses, the idea of reform from above seemed
preferable to parliamentary government managed by Newcastle and North,
in the interest of the British landlord. The economists are outwardly
and avowedly less liberal than Montesquieu, because they are
incomparably more impressed by the evils of the time, and the need of
immense and fundamental changes. They prepared to undo the work of
absolutism by the hand of absolutism. They were not its opponents,
but its advisers, and hoped to convert it by their advice. The
indispensable liberties are those which constitute the wealth of
nations; the rest will follow. The disease had lasted too long for the
sufferer to heal himself: the relief must come from the author of his
sufferings. The power that had done the wrong was still efficient to
undo the wrong. Transformation, infinitely more difficult in itself
than preservation, was not more formidable to the economists because
it consisted mainly in revoking the godless work of a darker age. They
deemed it their mission not to devise new laws, for that is a task
which God has not committed to man, but only to declare the inherent
laws of the existence of society and enable them to prevail.
The defects of the social and political organisation were as
distinctly pointed out by the economists as by the electors of the
National Assembly, twenty years later, and in nearly all things they
proposed the remedy. But they were persuaded that the only thing to
regenerate France was a convulsion which the national character would
make a dreadful one. They desired a large scheme of popular education,
because commands take no root in soil that is not prepared. Political
truths can be made so evident that the opinion of an instructed public
will be invincible, and will banish the abuse of power. To resist
oppression is to make a league with heaven, and all things are
oppressive that resist the natural order of freedom. For society
secures rights; it neither bestows nor restricts them. They are the
direct consequence of duties. As truth can only convince by the
exposure of errors and the defeat of objections, liberty is the
essential guard of truth. Society is founded, not on the will of man,
but on the nature of man and the will of God; and conformity to the
divinely appointed order is followed by inevitable reward. Relief of
those who suffer is the duty of all men, and the affair of all.
Such was the spirit of that remarkable group of men, especially of
Mercier de la Riviere, of whom Diderot said that he alone possessed
the true and everlasting secret of the security and the happiness of
empires. Turgot indeed had failed in office; but his reputation was
not diminished, and the power of his name exceeded all others at the
outbreak of the Revolution. His policy of employing the Crown to
reform the State was at once rejected in favour of other counsels; but
his influence may be traced in many acts of the Assembly, and on two
very memorable occasions it was not auspicious. It was a central dogma
of the party that land is the true source of wealth, or, as Asgill
said, that man deals in nothing but earth. When a great part of France
became national property, men were the more easily persuaded that land
can serve as the basis of public credit and of unlimited assignats.
According to a weighty opinion which we shall have to consider before
long, the parting of the ways in the Revolution was on the day when,
rejecting the example both of England and America, the French resolved
to institute a single undivided legislature. It was the Pennsylvanian
model and Voltaire had pronounced Pennsylvania the best government in
the world. Franklin gave the sanction of an oracle to the constitution
of his state, and Turgot was its vehement protagonist in Europe.
A king ruling over a level democracy, and a democracy ruling itself
through the agency of a king, were long contending notions in the
first Assembly. One was monarchy according to Turgot, the other was
monarchy adapted to Rousseau; and the latter, for a time, prevailed.
Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single
town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government
of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its
essential principle, and as it has since become, Geneva illustrated by
the Forest Cantons and the Landesgemeinde more than by its own
charters. The idea was that the grown men met in the market-place,
like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their
affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking
powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the same right
to defend his interest by the guarantee of his vote. The welfare of
all was safe in the hands of all, for they had not the separate
interests that are bred by the egotism of wealth, nor the exclusive
views that come from a distorted education. All being equal in power
and similar in purpose, there can be no just cause why some should
move apart and break into minorities. There is an implied contract
that no part shall ever be preferred to the whole, and minorities
shall always obey. Clever men are not wanted for the making of laws,
because clever men and their laws are at the root of all mischief.
Nature is a better guide than civilisation, because nature comes from
God, and His works are good; culture from man, whose works are bad in
proportion as he is remoter from natural innocence, as his desires
increase upon him, as he seeks more refined pleasures, and stores up
more superfluity. It promotes inequality, selfishness, and the ruin of
public spirit.
By plausible and easy stages the social ideas latent in parts of
Switzerland produced the theory that men come innocent from the hands
of the Creator, that they are originally equal, that progress from
equality to civilisation is the passage from virtue to vice and from
freedom to tyranny, that the people are sovereign, and govern by
powers given and taken away; that an individual or a class may be
mistaken and may desert the common cause and the general interest, but
the people, necessarily sincere, and true, and incorrupt, cannot go
wrong; that there is a right of resistance to all governments that are
fallible, because they are partial, but none against government of the
people by the people, because it has no master and no judge, and
decides in the last instance and alone; that insurrection is the law
of all unpopular societies founded on a false principle and a broken
contract, and submission that of the only legitimate societies, based
on the popular will; that there is no privilege against the law of
nature, and no right against the power of all. By this chain of
reasoning, with little infusion of other ingredients, Rousseau applied
the sequence of the ideas of pure democracy to the government of
nations.
Now the most glaring and familiar fact in history shows that the
direct self-government of a town cannot be extended over an empire. It
is a plan that scarcely reaches beyond the next parish. Either one
district will be governed by another, or both by somebody else chosen
for the purpose. Either plan contradicts first principles. Subjection
is the direct negation of democracy; representation is the indirect.
So that an Englishman underwent bondage to parliament as much as
Lausanne to Berne or as America to England if it had submitted to
taxation, and by law recovered his liberty but once in seven years.
Consequently Rousseau, still faithful to Swiss precedent as well as to
the logic of his own theory, was a federalist. In Switzerland, when
one half of a canton disagrees with the other, or the country with the
town, it is deemed natural that they should break into two, that the
general will may not oppress minorities. This multiplication of
self-governing communities was admitted by Rousseau as a preservative
of unanimity on one hand, and of liberty on the other. Helvetius came
to his support with the idea that men are not only equal by nature but
alike, and that society is the cause of variation; from which it would
follow that everything may be done by laws and by education.
Rousseau is the author of the strongest political theory that had
appeared amongst men. We cannot say that he reasons well, but he knew
how to make his argument seem convincing, satisfying, inevitable, and
he wrote with an eloquence and a fervour that had never been seen in
prose, even in Bolingbroke or Milton. His books gave the first signal
of a universal subversion, and were as fatal to the Republic as to the
Monarchy. Although he lives by the social contract and the law of
resistance, and owes his influence to what was extreme and systematic,
his later writings are loaded with sound political wisdom. He owes
nothing to the novelty or the originality of his thoughts. Taken
jointly or severally, they are old friends, and you will find them in
the school of Wolf that just preceded, in the dogmatists of the Great
Rebellion and the Jesuit casuists who were dear to Algernon Sidney, in
their Protestant opponents, Duplessis Mornay, and the Scots who had
heard the last of our schoolmen, Major of St. Andrews, renew the
speculations of the time of schism, which decomposed and dissected the
Church and rebuilt it on a model very propitious to political
revolution, and even in the early interpreters of the Aristotelian
Politics which appeared just at the era of the first parliament.
Rousseau's most advanced point was the doctrine that the people are
infallible. Jurieu had taught that they can do no wrong: Rousseau
added that they are positively in the right. The idea, like most
others, was not new, and goes back to the Middle Ages. When the
question arose what security there is for the preservation of
traditional truth if the episcopate was divided and the papacy vacant,
it was answered that the faith would be safely retained by the masses.
The maxim that the voice of the people is the voice of God is as old
as Alcuin; it was renewed by some of the greatest writers anterior to
democracy, by Hooker and Bossuet, and it was employed in our day by
Newman to prop his theory of development. Rousseau applied it to the
State.
The sovereignty of public opinion was just then coming in through the
rise of national debts and the increasing importance of the public
creditor. It meant more than the noble savage and the blameless South
Sea islander, and distinguished the instinct that guides large masses
of men from the calculating wisdom of the few. It was destined to
prove the most serious of all obstacles to representative government.
Equality of power readily suggests equality of property; but the
movement of Socialism began earlier, and was not assisted by Rousseau.
There were solemn theorists, such as Mably and Morelly, who were
sometimes quoted in the Revolution, but the change in the distribution
of property was independent of them.
A more effective influence was imported from Italy; for the Italians,
through Vico, Giannone, Genovesi, had an eighteenth century of their
own. Sardinia preceded France in solving the problem of feudalism.
Arthur Young affirms that the measures of the Grand Duke Leopold had,
in ten years, doubled the produce of Tuscany; at Milan, Count Firmian
was accounted one of the best administrators in Europe. It was a
Milanese, Beccaria, who, by his reform of criminal law, became a
leader of French opinion. Continental jurisprudence had long been
overshadowed by two ideas: that torture is the surest method of
discovering truth, and that punishment deters not by its justice, its
celerity, or its certainty, but in proportion to its severity. Even in
the eighteenth century the penal system of Maria Theresa and Joseph
II. was barbarous. Therefore no attack was more surely aimed at the
heart of established usage than that which dealt with courts of
justice. It forced men to conclude that authority was odiously stupid
and still more odiously ferocious, that existing governments were
accursed, that the guardians and ministers of law, divine and human,
were more guilty than their culprits. The past was branded as the
reign of infernal powers, and charged with long arrears of unpunished
wrong. As there was no sanctity left in law, there was no mercy for
its merciless defenders; and if they fell into avenging hands, their
doom would not exceed their desert. Men afterwards conspicuous by
their violence, Brissot and Marat, were engaged in this campaign of
humanity, which raised a demand for authorities that were not vitiated
by the accumulation of infamy, for new laws, new powers, a new
dynasty.
As religion was associated with cruelty, it is at this point that the
movement of new Ideas became a crusade against Christianity. A book by
the Cure Meslier, partially known at that time, but first printed by
Strauss in 1864, is the clarion of vindictive unbelief; and another
abbe, Raynal, hoped that the clergy would be crushed beneath the ruins
of their altars.
Thus the movement which began, in Fenelon's time, with warnings and
remonstrance and the zealous endeavour to preserve, which produced one
great scheme of change by the Crown and another at the expense of the
Crown, ended in the wild cry for vengeance and a passionate appeal to
fire and sword. So many lines of thought converging on destruction
explain the agreement that existed when the States-General began, and
the explosion that followed the reforms of '89, and the ruins of '93.
No conflict can be more irreconcilable than that between a
constitution and an enlightened absolutism, between abrogation of old
laws and multiplication of new, between representation and direct
democracy, the people controlling and the people governing, kings by
contract and kings by mandate.
Yet all these fractions of opinion were called Liberal: Montesquieu,
because he was an intelligent Tory; Voltaire, because he attacked the
clergy; Turgot, as a reformer; Rousseau, as a democrat; Diderot, as a
freethinker. The one thing common to them all is the disregard for
liberty.
II
THE INFLUENCE OF AMERICA
The several structures of political thought that arose in France, and
clashed in the process of revolution, were not directly responsible
for the outbreak. The doctrines hung like a cloud upon the heights,
and at critical moments in the reign of Lewis XV. men felt that a
catastrophe was impending. It befell when there was less provocation,
under his successor; and the spark that changed thought into action
was supplied by the Declaration of American Independence. It was the
system of an international extra-territorial universal Whig, far
transcending the English model by its simplicity and rigour. It
surpassed in force all the speculation of Paris and Geneva, for it had
undergone the test of experiment, and its triumph was the most
memorable thing that had been seen by men.
The expectation that the American colonies would separate was an old
one. A century before, Harrington had written: "They are yet babes,
that cannot live without sucking the breasts of their mother-cities;
but such as I mistake if, when they come of age, they do not wean
themselves; which causes me to wonder at princes that like to be
exhausted in that way." When, in 1759, the elder Mirabeau announced
it, he meant that the conquest of Canada involved the loss of America,
as the colonists would cling to England as long as the French were
behind them, and no longer. He came very near to the truth, for the
war in Canada gave the signal. The English colonies had meditated the
annexation of the French, and they resented that the king's government
undertook the expedition, to deprive them of the opportunity for
united action. Fifty years later President Adams said that the
treatment of American officers by the British made his blood boil.
The agitation began in 1761, and by the innovating ideas which it
flung abroad it is as important as the Declaration itself, or the
great constitutional debate. The colonies were more advanced than
Great Britain in the way of free institutions, and existed only that
they might escape the vices of the mother country. They had no
remnants of feudalism to cherish or resist. They possessed written
constitutions, some of them remarkably original, fit roots of an
immense development. George III. thought it strange that he should be
the sovereign of a democracy like Rhode Island, where all power
reverted annually to the people, and the authorities had to be elected
anew. Connecticut received from the Stuarts so liberal a charter, and
worked out so finished a scheme of local self-government, that it
served as a basis for the federal constitution. The Quakers had a plan
founded on equality of power, without oppression, or privilege, or
intolerance, or slavery. They declared that their holy experiment
would not have been worth attempting if it did not offer some very
real advantage over England. It was to enjoy freedom, liberty of
conscience, and the right to tax themselves, that they went into the
desert. There were points on which these men anticipated the doctrines
of a more unrestrained democracy, for they established their
government not on conventions, but on divine right, and they claimed
to be infallible. A Connecticut preacher said in 1638: "The choice of
public magistrates belongs unto the people, by God's own allowance.
They who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in
their power, also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and
place unto which they call them." The following words, written in
1736, appear in the works of Franklin: "The judgment of a whole
people, especially of a free people, is looked upon to be infallible.
And this is universally true, while they remain in their proper
sphere, unbiassed by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing
men. A body of people thus circumstanced cannot be supposed to judge
amiss on any essential points; for if they decide in favour of
themselves, which is extremely natural, their decision is just,
inasmuch as whatever contributes to their benefit is a general
benefit, and advances the real public good." A commentator adds that
this notion of the infallible perception by the people of their true
interest, and their unerring pursuit of it, was very prevalent in the
provinces, and for a time in the States after the establishment of
American independence.
In spite of their democratic spirit, these communities consented to
have their trade regulated and restricted, to their own detriment and
the advantage of English merchants. They had protested, but they had
ended by yielding. Now Adam Smith says that to prohibit a great people
from making all they can of every part of their own produce, or from
employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most
advantageous for themselves, is a manifest violation of the most
sacred rights of mankind. There was a latent sense of injury which
broke out when, in addition to interference with the freedom of trade,
England exercised the right of taxation. An American lately wrote:
"The real foundation of the discontent which led to the Revolution was
the effort of Great Britain, beginning in 1750, to prevent diversity
of occupation, to attack the growth of manufactures and the mechanic
arts, and the final cause before the attempt to tax without
representation was the effort to enforce the navigation laws." When
England argued that the hardship of regulation might be greater than
the hardship of taxation, and that those who submitted to the one
submitted, in principle, to the other, Franklin replied that the
Americans had not taken that view, but that, when it was put before
them, they would be willing to reject both one and the other. He knew,
however, that the ground taken up by his countrymen was too narrow. He
wrote to the French economist, Morellet: "Nothing can be better
expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer
liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil
liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour."