Revolution and the Republic
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Taine’s prose is masterful. ‘Nothing’, Taine wrote, ‘is now clearer than the object of
government: it is to subject the wicked to the good, or, which is briefer, to suppress
the wicked. To this end let us employ confiscation, imprisonment, deportation,
drowning and the guillotine. Against traitors, all means are permitted and merito-
rious; the Jacobin has canonized his murders and now he kills out of philanthro-
py.’303 The Jacobins massacred, he observed, ‘with the same impunity and as
methodically as cleaning the streets or killing stray dogs’.304
It was, however, in his psychological portraits of those whom he believed to have
led the Revolution—Marat ‘the lunatic’, Danton ‘the barbarian’, and Robespierre
‘the incurable, insignificant rhetorician’—that Taine excelled himself. Of the three,
Taine wrote, Marat was ‘the most monstrous’. He displayed ‘furious exaltation,
constant excitement, feverish activity, an inexhaustible propensity for writing, that
automatism of the mind and tetanus of the will under the constraint and rule of a
fixed idea and, in addition to this, the usual physical symptoms such as sleepless-
ness, a livid tint, bad blood, foulness of person and dress’. In short, Marat was
subject to ‘homicidal mania’.305 There was, Taine conceded, ‘nothing of the
madman about Danton’. Nonetheless, he possessed ‘the air of an exterminator’.
It was Danton who was the first to understand that the ultimate object of the
Revolution was ‘the dictatorship of the violent minority’ and that its means were
those of ‘popular brutality’.306 As for Robespierre, he was a pedant and a prig. ‘No
mind, in its mediocrity and incompetence’, Taine wrote, ‘so well harmonizes with
the spirit of the times.’ The very reverse of a statesman, Robespierre ‘soars in empty
space, surrounded by abstractions’.307 In his ‘elaborate eloquence’ there was
nothing but ‘the recipes of a worn-out art, Greek and Roman commonplaces’. It
was only natural that he should see himself as being persecuted and as a martyr.
This, Taine concluded, ‘is the exterior of the Revolution, a specious mask, and this,
what was hidden beneath it, a hideous face; under the nominal guise of a humani-
tarian theory it covers the effective dictatorship of evil and base passions; in its true
representative, as in itself, we everywhere see ferocity surface from philanthropy and
from the pedant appears the executioner’.308 In sum, the Jacobins were madmen
and fanatics and the Revolution was an episode of collective insanity.
The Jacobin Republic, Taine wrote, came to an end not only because of its
murders but, above all, because it was not ‘born viable’. It had within itself ‘a
principle of dissolution, an innate and mortal poison’. It lacked, Taine argued, the
essential principle required for the maintenance of all political societies: ‘the respect
302 Ibid. 173.
303 Ibid. v. 37.
304 Ibid. vi. 7.
305 Ibid. vii. 198.
306 Ibid. 225.
307 Ibid. 233.
308 Ibid. 272.
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History, Revolution, and Terror
of its members for each other’.309 The habits of trust and confidence between
governed and governors did not exist. As a consequence, the social body disinte-
grated and ‘and among the millions of disaggregated atoms there remains not one
nucleus of spontaneous cohesion and stable coordination’.310 In such circum-
stances, ‘civil France’ could not reconstruct itself. The same, however, was not
true of ‘military France’. Here, Taine wrote, ‘men have put each other to the test;
they are devoted to each other, subordinates to leaders, leaders to subordinates, and
all to one great work’.311 They had everything that was lacking in revolutionary
institutions. ‘Let a famous general appear’, therefore, and he will be followed and
when, ‘to his own advantage’, he acts to save the Republic ‘the whole of civil France
will welcome its liberator, its protector, its restorer’.312 To that end, the ‘master’
chose despotism and all his great works—the civil code, the university, the
Concordat, the centralized administration—tended towards the omnipotence of
the State and the omnipresence of government. Never, Taine remarked, had finer
and more symmetrical barracks been built and none were more adapted to narrow
egoism and the lowest elements of human nature. ‘In this philosophical barracks’,
Taine concluded, ‘we have lived for eighty years.’313
Between 1905 and 1907 Alphonse Aulard took time out from his own historical
researches to give two sets of lectures at the Sorbonne devoted (in a spirit of
‘impartiality’) to demolishing the reputation of Hippolyte Taine as a serious
historian of the Revolution.314 The catalogue of deficiencies detailed by Aulard
ranged inter alia from factual errors, inadequate sources, negligence, undue haste,
unproven assertions, unsubstantiated generalizations, and an uncritical judgement
bordering on naivety.315 Taine, Aulard wrote, showed himself ‘little capable of
reviewing a text, little capable of providing a true idea of its content, and little
capable of methodological exactitude’.316 But Aulard’s complaints amounted to
more than the charge of professional incompetence. At bottom, as must surely have
been clear to his audience, Aulard took exception to what he termed ‘the politico-
historical theory’ underpinning Taine’s vast enterprise. Taine’s intention, Aulard
argued, had been ‘to drive into the mind of the reader the idea that a Revolution,
inspired by bad philosophy, could only be calamitous’.317 Follow tradition and
innovate less was its ‘conservative conclusion’.
In Aulard’s opinion, Taine had failed completely to understand the purposes and
goals of the Jacobins,318 reducing all their actions to pillage and murder inspired by
revolutionary utopianism and a retrogressive conception of the State. By way of
conclusion, therefore, Aulard did not pull his punches. ‘The whole of the Terror’,
he declared, ‘can be explained (I do not say: can be justified) by the circumstances
of civil and foreign war in which France then found itself. Taine does not speak of
309 Origines de la France contemporaine, 424.
310 Ibid. 427.
311 Ibid.
312 Ibid. 429.
313 Ibid. 431.
314 Taine, Historien de la Révolution Française (1907).
315 For a summary of these deficiencies, ibid. 63.
316 Ibid. 26.
317 Ibid. 113.
318 Aulard took particular exception to Taine’s description of the Jacobins as crocodiles: ibid. 207.
History, Revolution, and Terror
293
these circumstances or makes only passing allusion to them.’319 The means of
violence employed by the Montagnards, Aulard continued, were attributed by
Taine to philosophical fanaticism alone. He revealed their rage without explaining
their anger and thus portrayed it as a form of madness. Consequently, if Taine had
intended to renew the history of the Revolution, he had succeeded in adding
nothing to what had already been said in the past by ‘royalist pamphleteers’.
‘When all is said and
done’, Aulard ended, ‘this book and its general conclusions
seem almost useless as history.’320 At best, it served to enlighten us on the
intellectual biography of Taine himself and on that of some of his disciples. Thus
damned with faint praise, what did Aulard intend to put in its place?
An important early clue was visible in a short study he published in 1884
devoted to the guillotined Georges Danton.321 For Aulard, Danton was the true
hero of the Revolution. Not only was he a good man—against Danton’s detractors,
Aulard painted a picture of someone who was honest, loyal to his friends, incapable
of hatred, and devoted to both his widowed mother and wife—but he was also
the person who saved France from her enemies and who, ‘through his wisdom
and good practical sense’, defended a vision of the Republic as a system of
government most likely to reconcile order and progress. Without Danton, Aulard
commented, ‘France, delivered up to anarchy, would not have been able to
defend herself against Europe and the Revolution would have been choked in
blood’.322 Had not Robespierre’s jealousy of Danton turned to hatred, Aulard
argued, France would have been saved from Bonaparte and the return of the
Bourbons. Nor would the advent of a ‘well-ordered Republic’ have been delayed
for seventy-five years.
Aulard’s Histoire politique de la Révolution française323 was, as its title suggests, a
book that left the military, financial, and diplomatic history of the Revolution to
one side. ‘Every attempt at writing history’, he observed, ‘is necessarily an abstrac-
tion.’324 It was also, for the most part, chronological in form, recounting the
complex events of the time with great clarity, pace, and verve. In Aulard’s own
opinion, his book had no ‘historical thesis’ and no ‘preconceived idea’ to sustain.325
His was to be an ‘objective’ narration of the facts. Yet the reader had not to look far
to discover either the overall theme or the explicit political message. ‘I wish to
write’, Aulard announced, ‘the political history of the Revolution from the point of
view of the origin and development of democracy and of the republic.’326 Having
completed his task, he then felt able to assert that ‘the facts brought together in this
book remove any equivocal meaning from the words: French Revolution’.327 No
longer would it be possible to confuse the principles of the Revolution and the
actions conforming to those principles with the period of the Revolution itself and
all the actions performed during that time. This ‘abusive manner of speaking’ had
been such as to allow many people to see the Revolution as being in the grip of a
‘capricious, sanguinary, and violent’ power. ‘Now, I think’, Aulard wrote, ‘the
319 Ibid. 326.
320 Ibid. 330.
321 Danton (1884).
322 Ibid. 54.
323 (1901).
324 Ibid., p. viii.
325 Ibid. 780.
326 Ibid., p. v.
327 Ibid. 782.
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History, Revolution, and Terror
meaning is clearer: the Revolution consists in the Declaration of rights drafted in
1789 and completed in 1793, and in the attempts made to realise this declaration:
the counter-revolution consists in the attempts made to prevent the French from
acting in accordance with the principles of the Declaration of rights.’328 The two
most important of these principles, Aulard further specified, were those of equality
of rights and of national sovereignty. Democracy was the ‘logical consequence’ of
the first and the Republic was the logical consequence of the second.329 Subsequent
French history was an attempt to secure their full realization.
There is little need to set out anything more than the broad outlines of Aulard’s
narrative. Crucially, he believed that ‘on the eve of the Revolution no one dreamt of
establishing a republic in France’.330 There was, in other words, no republican
party and no philosophers’ plot. So, instead of democracy, the ‘men of 1789
established a bourgeois government based upon a property qualification’ and
instead of a republic they set up a constitutional monarchy.331 Aulard suggested
that much the same state of mind persisted right up to the moment of the king’s
flight to Varennes in June 1792, the majority of democrats ‘considering it a
dangerous folly to propose a republic given the ignorance and obliviousness of
the masses’.332 After the king’s abortive flight, both ‘logic and the future’ were on
the side of the republic. Given that it had proved impossible to reform the old state
of affairs, a sudden and violent revolution was now inevitable. To this was added
‘the complexity of circumstances’. ‘These conditions of internal and external war’,
Aulard affirmed, ‘imprinted upon the development and application of the princi-
ples of 1789 a quality of feverish haste, of improvisation, of contradiction, of
violence, and of weakness, especially from 1792 onwards.’333 The revolutionaries
were obliged to legislate for peace in a time of war, for a democratic republic from
within a military camp. There could be neither unity of plan nor continuity of
method.
Accordingly, Aulard went to great lengths to emphasize that the revolutionary
government associated with the Terror ‘formed itself empirically, from day to day,
out of elements imposed upon it by the successive necessities of national defence
and of a people at war against Europe’.334 The Terror was an ‘expedient of war’ and
one that was always envisaged to be temporary and provisional. As such, it was
incorrect to speak of either a ‘system’ or a ‘reign’ of terror. For the revolutionaries,
Aulard insisted, the Terror amounted to the ‘opposite of their dreams and ideals’
and was only resorted to in order to secure ‘the final triumph of the principles of
1789’.335
Aulard, therefore, did not seek to deny that the revolutionary government
brought to a close with Robespierre’s fall constituted a ‘tyrannical dictatorship’,
but, in his opinion, this experience was an aberration that did nothing to diminish
the Revolution’s fundamental message of government through law and liberty.
Moreover, the full significance of this moment was not properly captured in its
328 Aulard, Histoire politique, 78.
329 Ibid. 5.
330 Ibid. 28.
331 Ibid., p. v.
332 Ibid. 112.
333 Ibid., p. vi.
334 Ibid. 357–8.
335 Ibid. 367.
History, Revolution, and Terror
295
designation as a provisional expedient. Certain of the measures taken by the
revolutionary government, although entirely fortuitous, bore, in Aulard’s phrase,
‘the mark of preoccupations concerning the future’.336 This was true of the
declaration that the means of subsistence were to be held in common. It was true
of the cult of the Supreme Being which, according to Aulard, was ‘an attempt to
establish one of the essential foundations of the future State’.337 It was also true of
schemes for a national education system. ‘This government according to circum-
stance’, Aulard conclude
d, ‘contains the germs and outlines of institutions, the
points of departure for new and renovated theories, an element of the France of the
future.’338
The same theme was evident in the few concluding remarks with which Aulard
closed his narrative. The French Revolution, he argued, was not the work of a few
distinguished individuals or of a superior generation: it was ‘a political, social, and
rational ideal which the French have attempted partially to realize’. If the march
towards the attainment of that ideal had been, at times, arrested, suspended,
abolished, and reversed, it was because the French people had proved ‘insufficiently
educated to exercise its sovereignty’. To educate the people, therefore, was the true
political task of the republicans.
The contrast between Taine and Aulard could not have been starker. The
Revolution as pathological crisis and as spontaneous anarchy was countered by a
description of 1789 as defence of the nation and as an immanent social and
democratic republic. It was, moreover, a contrast broadly representative of tensions
and disagreements that had run right through the nineteenth century and one that
was heavy with political implications. In this case, conservative liberalism was
pitched against moderate republicanism, but, in essence, the questions being fought
over remained those of whether the achievements of the Revolution justified its
crimes and whether the Revolution was the harbinger of a new society of liberty or a
fundamentally evil and destructive event. Was there, for historians at least, a way
out of this impasse? One man, Augustin Cochin, believed that there was and to that
end in 1909 he published a brilliant essay entitled La Crise de l‘histoire révolution-
naire: Taine et M. Aulard.339 In part it was Cochin’s purpose to defend Taine
against Aulard’s criticisms of poor scholarship (both, in Cochin’s opinion, were
equally culpable) but the broader, and far more important, ambition was to enable
revolutionary historiography to transcend this polemic.
The ‘problem’, as Cochin termed it,340 had its origin in the fact that, to date, all
historians of the Revolution had worked with an idealized conception of the people,
portraying them as one enormous allegorical and anonymous figure. Yet, in his
view, this ideal form only existed in the imaginations of the ‘initiated’, in the