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Revolution and the Republic

Page 62

by Jeremy Jennings


  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.

  292

  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.

  294

  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

 

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