In what followed Michelet was always at pains to relieve the people of any
responsibility for the acts of violence and savagery that came increasingly to
characterize the Revolution. Those ‘sanguinary deeds’ had as their perpetrators
only ‘an infinitely small number of men’.146 Rather, Michelet’s emphasis fell upon
what he described as ‘the epoch of unanimity, the holy epoch when the whole
nation, free from distinctions of party and scarcely knowing opposition between
classes, marched together under the flag of fraternity’.147 This ‘humane and
benevolent’ phase of the Revolution, on Michelet’s account, attained its apotheosis
with the first Fête de la Fédération on 14 July 1790. ‘I do not believe’, Michelet
wrote, ‘that at any time the heart of man was more generous or full.’148 What was
136 See Eric Fauquet, Michelet ou la gloire du professeur d’histoire (1990), 224–316; Paul Viallaneix,
Michelet, les travaux et les jours 1798–1874 (1998), 299–326; and Paule Petitier, Jules Michelet:
L’Homme histoire (2006), 201–53.
137 Histoire de la Révolution française, i. 31.
138 Le Peuple, 58.
139 Histoire de la Révolution française, ii. 897.
140 Ibid. i. 51.
141 Ibid. 54.
142 Ibid. 55.
143 Ibid. 93.
144 Ibid. 75.
145 Ibid. 198.
146 Ibid. 37.
147 Ibid. 38.
148 Ibid. 330.
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here most evident was what Michelet described as ‘the spontaneous organization of
France’, the overcoming of the distinctions and barriers of geography, race, wealth,
language, and religion that had formerly divided the French from one another.149
‘To attain unity’, Michelet wrote, ‘nothing was able to prove an obstacle, no
sacrifice was too dear.’150 Such was the power of love. Was this a miracle? Yes,
Michelet replied, and ‘the greatest and the simplest of miracles’, the renunciation of
‘senseless animosities’ and a return to ‘sociability’.151 So too it was but ‘the natural
and necessary application of the very principle of the Revolution’: justice.152
Yet Michelet knew as much as anyone else that the Revolution had not delivered
on this initial promise and that he had to explain the failure of the new religion of
fraternity. Not for the first or the last time, ambiguity appeared in the account
provided. It began in the first chapter that followed the three devoted to the Fête de
la Fédération. The unity there displayed, Michelet wrote, had been sincere but
momentary and had not been strong enough to prevent the reappearance of class
divisions and differences of opinion. The bourgeoisie ‘trembled’ before the Revo-
lution it had made and, standing back from its work, was soon consumed by hatred
and fear. As this ‘internal obstacle’ to the Revolution took shape, there emerged the
external obstacles fuelled by the hypocrisy and ‘unshakable hatred’ of the clergy and
the English. ‘The bourgeoisie’, Michelet commented, ‘drank the English opium,
with all its ingredients of egoism, well-being, comfort, and liberty without sacri-
fice.’153 It was then that Michelet introduced the Jacobins into his account,
describing what he termed ‘a revolutionary clergy’ with Robespierre as its leader.154
‘Mutual surveillance, public censure, and even secret denunciation’ were what they
taught and practised, their vision of society modelled upon the ‘illustrious examples
of Antiquity’ and ‘the monastic cities of the Middle Ages’. For these bitter and
distrustful men everyone appeared as a suspect.
Over the next several hundred pages, Michelet explored the dynamics of this
situation, the great Jacobin ‘machine’ thriving on public apathy and indifference
and progressively substituting the spirit of conspiracy for that of fraternity.155 He
castigated the clergy and their counter-revolutionary allies. He condemned the
duplicity of traitors such as Charles-François Dumouriez156 and deplored the
endless infighting among the factions that vied with each other for leadership of
the Revolution. He likewise scorned the lack of principle and vanity of the
Girondins, deriding them as ‘the protective mask’ of royalism.157 The Terror was
nothing but a ‘judicial dictatorship’ inspired by fanaticism and sectarianism.
Unusually, but intentionally, Michelet ended his account with the fall of Robe-
spierre. After Thermidor, there was nothing left of the Revolution.158
149 Histoire de la Révolution française, 318.
150 Ibid. 326.
151 Ibid. 325.
152 Ibid. 336.
153 Ibid. 356.
154 Ibid. 393.
155 Ibid., ii. 127–8.
156 Ibid. 335–48. After having led the French army to victory at Valmy and Jemmapes, Dumouriez
went over to the Austrians.
157 Ibid. 143–8.
158 Michelet was to explore this period of French history in his Histoire du dix-neuvième siècle (see
Œuvres complètes, xxi. 1872–1874 (1982)), starting his history of the 19th cent. with the fall of
History, Revolution, and Terror
269
Michelet’s Revolution, therefore, was the Revolution of 1789. For him, the
stirring events that followed the calling of the Estates-General denoted a radical
rupture with the past and the advent of a new age. He gloried in the Revolution’s
universal message of justice and peace, believing that for the first time law and
religion had been brought together as one.159 He recognized the uniqueness of the
event and saw it as being embedded in the history and destiny of France. He never
ceased to praise the heroism and generosity of the people, always comparing their
behaviour favourably with that of their leaders. To that end, Michelet’s Revolution
was not, unlike that of Mignet and Thiers, a history of the rise of the bourgeoisie.
Nor was it infused with the liberal Anglophilia associated with Guizot’s popular
notion that 1789 was a French 1640 and, therefore, that the Revolution of 1830
was a replay of England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. In contradistinction to
Buchez and many others, he saw the Revolution not as a rebirth of the true spirit of
Christianity but as marking its end, as the effacement of a doctrine that espoused
‘the unjust transmission of evil by original sin’.160 Michelet’s Revolution took
inspiration from Voltaire and Rousseau, not from the Bible. Likewise, if Michelet
accepted that the Jacobins had saved France from external invasion, he was not
prepared, as Mignet and Louis Blanc had been, to attribute the Terror to circum-
stances alone. It had been tyranny and Michelet could not refrain from observing
that many royalists had a weakness and sneaking admiration for Robespierre.
Michelet defined his own position as ‘Montagnard but not Jacobin’.161 He
would, he told his readers, have voted against the Girondins but he would have
opposed the ‘inquisitorial spirit’ and ‘violent Machiavellianism’ of the Jacobin club.
If, beyond the people themselves, he had any heroes they were Danton and Camille
Desmoulins.162 Yet Michelet believed that the violent efforts that the Revolution
had made t
o save itself had subsequently been mistaken ‘by a forgetful generation’
for the Revolution itself. So unknown was its origin and nature that the ‘the
profoundly peaceful and benevolent character’ of the Revolution now seemed a
paradox. None remained upon the altar of the Revolution but Robespierre and
Saint-Just and, for as long as this remained the case, Michelet concluded, the
message of the Revolution would not be heard and absolute governments could
sleep easily. The world would only be won over by ‘the fraternity of love, and not
that of the guillotine’.163
Michelet began writing his Histoire de la Révolution française under the July
Monarchy and completed it in August 1853 under the Second Empire. In the
mean time, in April 1852, he had been removed from his post at the Collège de
France by the new Minister of Public Education. The same fate befell his close
Robespierre. As he commented: ‘At this moment history seems to fall into a chasm’. History was now
reduced to that of one man, Napoleon, and to ‘pure biography’: ibid. 218–19.
159 Histoire de la Révolution française, ii. 172–3.
160 Ibid. i. 36.
161 Ibid. ii. 404.
162 Desmoulins was a talented journalist and member of the Convention. He was executed, along
with Danton, on 5 Apr. 1794.
163 Ibid. i. 34.
270
History, Revolution, and Terror
friend Edgar Quinet.164 During the Second Republic Quinet had served as a
parliamentary deputy and he was now to begin a period of lengthy exile in Belgium
and Switzerland.165 Side by side, both men had waged a common struggle against
the power of the Roman Catholic Church, each devoting a course of lectures to the
Jesuits.166 In Quinet’s case, he followed this with a second volume in 1844 devoted
to a doctrine closely associated with the Jesuits: Ultramontanism.167 In the intro-
duction to the latter, Quinet indicated his preference for what he called ‘a religion
of sincerity’. A similar battle cry was heard one year later when Quinet published
his magisterial Le Christianisme et la Révolution française, except that this time he
began by voicing his disapproval of the dominant philosophy of the age: the
Eclecticism associated with Victor Cousin.168 It was, Quinet announced, a philos-
ophy that no longer even believed in itself and denoted nothing else than ‘spiritual
and moral bankruptcy’.169 If then, as he proclaimed, the ‘philosophy of the
Restoration was dead’, from what sources could the discouraged generation of the
July Monarchy derive moral and intellectual succour?
To answer that question Quinet delved deep into the history of the Christian
Church, uncovering a set of beliefs and practices that were far removed from those
of its modern equivalent. The early Christians were not constrained by a body of
fixed and rigid dogma—all was ‘inspiration, fervour, spontaneity, movement’—and
the Christian fathers had believed that the spirit of God was to be found in all of us.
They similarly thought that the ideals of Christianity were realizable here on earth.
However, overlaid upon this early faith had been doctrines that had undermined
the emancipatory potential of the Christian religion. The distinction between the
City of God and the City of Man entailed the indefinite postponement of a
terrestrial paradise. The doctrine of predestination took away any notion of
man’s ‘moral liberty’. Bossuet’s conception of a Christian sovereign relieved the
monarch of any concern for his people. The Crusades turned war into a form of
hatred and extermination. Quinet’s list was extensive but each item was designed to
show that Christianity had been betrayed by the Catholic Church. Conversely,
Quinet was prepared to draw inspiration from those heretics and dissenters who
had sought to return to the words of Christ himself and running through his
lectures was the constant invocation to his audience that they should aspire to do
the same. ‘Our task, and that of those who come after us’, he wrote, ‘will be to show
that the people of God are not only in Judea, that they live among us, that the city
164 See Hermione Quinet, Cinquante Ans d’amitié: Michelet-Quinet (1825–1875) (1899). See also Edgar
Quinet, Lettres d’éxil à Michelet et à divers amis, 2 vols. (1885).
165 On Quinet see Winock, Les Voix de la Liberté, 450–62, Furet, La Gauche et la révolution au XIXe
siècle (1986) and Ceri Crossley, Edgar Quinet (1803–1875): A Study in Romantic Thought (Lexington,
Ky., 1983).
166 The courses of both men were printed in the same volume: Des Jésuites (1843). Quinet’s text
appears at pp. 107–249.
167 L’Ultramonantisme ou l’église romaine et la société moderne (1844). As opposed to Gallicanism,
Ultramontanism stressed the authority of the Pope over the Catholic Church in France.
168 On Cousin and Eclecticism see pp. 320–3 below.
169 Quinet, Le Christianisme et la Révolution française (1845), 41.
History, Revolution, and Terror
271
of God is not in ruins, that each day it continues to grow in the midst of us and
through us.’170
Yet Quinet also believed that the true spirit of Christianity found expression
outside the Church. It existed within the French people and defined the character
of the French Revolution. The Revolution, he argued, drew upon the hope that
the message of the Gospel could be realized in this world and that it was not
consigned to the ‘city of the dead’.171 In this Quinet was scarcely original: the
assumption of a similarity between the Christian and the revolutionary idea had
become something of a commonplace. It was what came next in Quinet’s argument
that was new.
‘Alone of modern nations’, Quinet asserted, ‘France carried out a political and
social revolution before completing its religious revolution.’ From this, he
continued, arose all that was ‘original, monstrous, gigantic, and implacable in this
history’.172 A revolution that began by wishing to reconcile Church and State
finished up by setting them at war with each other but, although seemingly
banished, the intolerant spirit of Catholicism had remained at the heart of things.
Quickly one church was replaced by another, replete with its own ceremonies,
rituals, and images. A new state religion was created with Robespierre cast not only
as dictator but also as the new pope. Why, Quinet asked, was Danton sent to the
scaffold if not for lack of faith, ‘to be an epicurean became a crime of heresy’.173
In brief, the argument was that the Revolution had not freed itself from the
exclusive and absolutist temper of the Church and therefore that the least dissent
was viewed as ‘inexpiable schism’. ‘The sentimental logic of Rousseau’, Quinet
wrote, took ‘as its instrument the axe of Saint Bartholomew’.174 The result was
violence and a disregard for individual conscience. If Quinet admired the heroic
efforts of the Convention to secure the defence of France, he saw the Terror and the
cult of the Supreme Being as nothing but manifestations of a new state religion. He
also believed that the armies of the Revolution were new crusaders, their task being
the
‘moral elevation of their adversaries’ and ‘friendship between peoples’.175 The
defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, by contrast, was the Golgotha of the modern age,
an act of Providence that had left France for dead.176
Manifestly, Quinet was not writing a history of the Revolution. His concern was
to explore its temperament and spirit, to trace its lineage and affiliations. The failure
of the Revolution, in his view, resulted from the prior absence of a genuine religious
revolution but this did not prevent him from maintaining that, ‘in many regards’,
the ideal of the Revolution came closer to that of Christianity than did anything
then being preached by the Church.177 The significance of this should not be lost
upon us. First, it meant that, in Quinet’s eyes, Catholicism could no longer be
considered ‘the national religion of our country’. Next, by drawing out the
absolutist tendencies of both the Revolution and the Church, he distanced himself
from interpretations of the Revolution and of Jacobinism as forerunners of
170 Ibid. 127–8.
171 Ibid. 113–14.
172 Ibid. 334.
173 Ibid. 348.
174 Ibid. 349.
175 Ibid. 202–3.
176 Ibid. 383.
177 Ibid. 402.
272
History, Revolution, and Terror
Christian socialism. This was so because, although no Protestant,178 at the heart of
Quinet’s conception of Christianity was the sanctity of the individual conscience.
Quinet unambiguously placed the rights of the individual before the demands of
association.179 Finally, although Le Christianisme et la Révolution française was
dedicated to Michelet, what separated the two men was all too clear. Both endorsed
the exemplary and universal character of French history and of the Revolution
itself; but for Michelet the Revolution terminated the history of Christianity whilst,
for Quinet, what was best in the Revolution recaptured and gave life to Christian-
ity’s original message.
The political conclusion that Quinet sought to convey was summarized in the
fourteenth of his lectures. The ‘ideal of the future’, he announced, ‘must contain
and reconcile the moral advance of the Constituent Assembly without its illusions,
the energy of the Convention without its cruelty, and the splendour of Napoleon
without his despotism’.180 In line with this clarion call Quinet actively embraced
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