Revolution and the Republic
Page 60
changeable, so routine-bound, and so capable of coming above or below the
‘common norms of humanity’. France alone, Tocqueville wrote, ‘could give birth
to a revolution so sudden, so radical, so impetuous in its course and yet so full of
reverses, contradictory facts and contrary examples’.240 But the reality, as he himself
acknowledged, was that, for all its frequent revival in new and unexpected forms,
the desire for liberty quickly succumbed before a love of equality that remained
234 Ibid. 232.
235 Ibid. 235.
236 Ibid. 243.
237 Ibid. 248.
238 Ibid.
239 Ibid.
240 Ibid. 250.
282
History, Revolution, and Terror
constant. Such, at least, was how it appeared to Tocqueville from deep within the
Second Empire of Napoleon III.
Tocqueville, like so many of his fellow historians, could not resist asserting the
unique and exceptional character of the Revolution. He was, on the other hand,
immune from the commonly held faith in the virtues of the people and plainly saw
little evidence of the Revolution as the dawn of a new religion of justice and
fraternity. Indeed, with the notable exception of the summer of 1789, Tocqueville
appears to have discerned few signs of political innovation among the momentous
events that shook France to her very foundations. However, Tocqueville was to be
by no means alone in stressing the theme of continuity. As we have seen, Quinet,
under the influence of Tocqueville, was to rework the idea in order to suggest that
the Revolution marked a revival of monarchical absolutism. Another person to
develop this theme was the diplomatic historian Albert Sorel. 241 ‘The fact is’, Sorel
wrote, almost three decades later, ‘that the Revolution did not, as has too often been
said, break the chain of French history.’242 Although probably the most remarkable
of episodes, it was nonetheless only ‘one episode’ in that history. Indeed, Sorel
ended the introduction to his L’Europe et la Révolution française by emphasizing
that this was the very point of his eight-volume study. ‘I should consider my work
not to have been useless’, he observed, ‘if I had attained the following result: to have
shown the French Revolution, which to some has appeared as the subversion and to
others as the regeneration of the old European world, to be the natural and
necessary consequence of the history of Europe and to have established that this
Revolution produced no consequence, not even the most surprising, that does not
flow from this history and is not explicable by the precedents of the ancien
régime.’243
With regard to the internal dynamics of the Revolution, Sorel’s argument built
upon a set of insights gleaned from Tocqueville. In 1789, he believed, everything
was ready for revolution. The ancien régime was in decay; the government was
bankrupt and powerless; men of letters displayed a mixture of fanaticism and
doctrinal infatuation; and ‘a wild frenzy was brewing among the masses’. Above
all, Sorel wrote, ‘the spirit of the Third Estate was that of the lawyers’.244 It was they
who were to turn the ideas of the philosophes into legislation and by choosing its
representatives from among this group ‘the people were appropriating and
continuing the traditions of the crown’.245 True to these traditions, if sovereignty
passed from the monarch to the people, the lawyers attributed to the new sovereign
all the qualities of the old one. ‘At bottom’, Sorel commented, ‘things returned to
the point from which they had started.’246 The State remained what it had always
241 On Albert Sorel, see L’Europe et la Révolution française: Discours prononcés le 29 mars 1905 à la
fête en l’honneur de M. Albert Sorel (1905). Of particular interest are the texts by Emile Boutmy and
Gabriel Hanotaux: ibid. 23–61.
242 L’Europe et la Révolution française (1885), i. 238.
243 Ibid. 8.
244 Ibid. 221.
245 Ibid.
246 Ibid. 222.
History, Revolution, and Terror
283
been and ‘the spirit of the old government reappeared in the very institutions
intended to destroy it’.247 Thus, the National Assembly ‘promptly’ set about
concentrating all power in its own hands; and when, through ‘force of circum-
stances’, abstract ideals were abandoned, ‘traditional forms of behaviour and ideas
prevailed’. None were on the side of liberty and they provided countless precedents
for despotism. ‘Thus’, Sorel wrote, ‘in the guise of expedients all the procedures of
the ancien régime insinuated themselves into the Revolution.’248 Once returned,
they remained uncontested, and power came to be concentrated in ever fewer
hands, from a Committee of twelve to a Directory of five, from a Consulate of three
to an Empire of one.
Sorel gave many examples of the continuities in practice that this entailed. Two
might be cited here. The first concerned the Revolution’s treatment of the Church.
Despite the appearance of innovation the Revolution ‘quite simply applied to the
clergy and to recalcitrant Catholics measures which the monarchy had employed
against heretics’.249 Revolutionary legislation merely copied the edicts of Louis XIV
against the Protestants. The second example related to the Terror. It could not be
said that the abuses and excesses of the ancien régime produced the Terror but they
did ‘all derive from the same source’. The ‘terrorists’ had had no intention of
avenging the victims of Louis XIV but ‘the same fanaticism produced the same
results’. ‘Considered in this way’, Sorel wrote, ‘the Terror is stripped of the
sophistical prestige with which its retrospective apologists have tried to surround
it. The only striking thing that remains is the extent of its plagiarism.’250
Given that the ancien régime had no pretensions to liberty and that the Revolu-
tion had so readily aped its customs and practices, it would have been ‘truly
extraordinary’, Sorel concluded, if the Revolution had marked the ‘triumph of
liberty’. The cause for regret was that, if the ancien régime had been ‘self-consistent’
in its despotism, the ‘terrorists’ had been ‘humanitarian and sentimental’ in theory
and ‘barbarous’ in practice.251 It was this contradiction that the world had seen.
However, Sorel’s exploration of the theme of continuity merits particular atten-
tion because his primary focus was upon foreign policy. His fundamental point was
that ‘for external as well as internal affairs there had existed permanent historical
necessities’ and that these had been played out during the Revolution.252 This
argument was developed by Sorel in the first of his eight volumes and then
summarized in a conclusion which, in his words, provided ‘the basic structure of
this history’.253 Sorel’s thesis was that French foreign policy was determined by
geography and, therefore, by the need to establish secure frontiers. This was a
constant from the Capetian monarchs onwards and it produced what Sorel termed
the ‘classic system’ of French diplomacy. Its essential principle was moderation and
&nbs
p; compromise and a recognition that in foreign undertakings there were certain limits
beyond which it was unwise to go and which would not be tolerated by her
neighbours. Henri IV and Richelieu were the primary exemplars of this tradition.
Alongside this, on the other hand, were a set of contrary instincts, described by
247 Ibid. 223.
248 Ibid. 225.
249 Ibid. 230.
250 Ibid. 232–3.
251 Ibid. 233.
252 Ibid. 242.
253 Ibid. 537–52.
284
History, Revolution, and Terror
Sorel as ‘gusts of romantic ambition, an intoxication with conquest and a capricious
taste for glory and adventure’.254 This ‘craving for the impossible’ was best
exemplified (with disastrous results) by the military excesses of Louis XIV. Sorel’s
point was that these two instincts had coexisted over the centuries and that the
Revolution brought each of them into operation in turn.
In essence, Sorel’s claim was the National Assembly of 1789 sought to continue
the policies of moderation and that there was nothing in the new political principles
of the Revolution that was not compatible with peace across Europe. The Revolu-
tion had renounced the right of conquest for the reasons which ‘self-interest rightly
understood, prudence and reflection had suggested to the most far-seeing diplomats
of the ancien régime’.255 Moreover, if ‘honestly applied’, the ‘one basic principle of
the Revolution’, sovereignty of the people, would have prevented ‘all the abuses of
conquest’. Every nation would have had the right to determine its own fate.
Sorel next suggested, however, that neither France nor Europe were ready for
such a radical reform of political habits and thus ‘the spirit of proselytism quickly
came to dominate the Revolution; the idea of conquest continued to prevail in
Europe; and a bitter war followed’.256 By the time that peace again became possible
in 1795 those who now ruled had ‘transferred to the people all the qualities that
their predecessors had attributed to the majesty of the king: they incited them to
pursue glory, urged them to war, and founded on their passions the power they
exercised in their name’.257 In short, by embarking upon a war of conquest the
Revolution deviated from ‘the true French tradition’ and recklessly endangered
France’s permanent interests. If this signified that the revolutionaries were follow-
ing ‘impulses as old as French history’, it also meant that the Republic was handed
over to the generals and that France committed herself to an expansion that she was
incapable of supporting. As Sorel concluded, the result could only ever have been
self-destruction. The sole remedy, therefore, was for France ‘to revive the policies
drawn up by the wisest of her ministers on the eve of the Revolution’ and it was this
that had been done ‘after twenty-two years of relentless struggle’ and when France
had been ‘defeated by the enemies allied against her’.
Many nineteenth-century histories of the Revolution devoted considerable space
to the wars engaged upon by the Republic and the Empire. In these accounts, the
achievement of military glory frequently figured as a compensation for domestic
failure and the abandonment of revolutionary ideals. To an extent, Sorel mirrored
this perspective, stating that it was in war that the Revolution ‘secured its most
astonishing achievements’. But, he added, ‘this was its greatness and its ruin’.258 In
the main body of his history, therefore, Sorel displayed no sympathy for the view
that the Terror had saved France from her external enemies nor did he countenance
a justification of revolutionary war as a means of defeating counter-revolutionary
forces. Rather, what he emphasized repeatedly was that the vices of the Revolution
were a legacy of the past. So, for Sorel, it was not only the internal causes leading to
the degeneration of France into ‘bloody anarchy’ that had existed before 1789: the
254 L’Europe et la Révolution française (1885), 242–3.
255 Ibid. 318.
256 Ibid. 318–19.
257 Ibid. 319.
258 Ibid. 242.
History, Revolution, and Terror
285
same was true of the tendency to despotism and conquest in foreign affairs. ‘The
Revolution of 1789’, Sorel wrote, ‘was easily reconcilable with policy of Henri IV
and Richelieu but not that of Louis XIV.’ Such, however, had been the ‘strange
destiny’ of the Revolution.259
Albert Sorel had been exceptionally well placed to undertake his study of the
international dimensions of the Revolution. From 1866 to 1875 he had held an
appointment in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after which he obtained a teaching
post at the newly established École Libre des Sciences Politiques. Early in his
academic career he wrote several works of diplomatic history, most notably studies
of the partition of Poland and of the Franco-Prussian war, before embarking upon
his history of the Revolution, a task completed only in 1904. Sorel also wrote book-
length studies of both Montesquieu and Madame de Staël. The political views he
espoused, as might be surmised, were those of a conservative and moderate
republicanism, and as such mirrored those of his academic colleagues in Paris.
That same institution, founded by Émile Boutmy, also remained deeply indebt-
ed to the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville. This merits comment because in this
period both Tocqueville’s work and his reputation were quickly consigned to
oblivion.260 In truth, this fate befell De la Démocratie en Amérique long before it
did L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, but the institutionalization of the study of the
Revolution—symbolized through the creation of a chair in the history of Revolu-
tion at the Sorbonne in 1891 and the founding of the Société de l’Histoire de la
Révolution française—engendered a method of inquiry and perspective widely at
odds with that exemplified by Tocqueville. University lecture courses on the
Revolution were now deemed permissible because the Third Republic believed
itself to have been established upon sound institutional and political foundations.
Moreover, as Françoise Mélonio remarks, ‘teaching revolutionary history was part
of a republican strategy to give the Republic the halo of a glorious birth’.261
Michelet, and not Tocqueville, was to provide the republican textbook.262
V
The first holder of the chair in the history of the Revolution was Alphonse Aulard
and it was to be him, more than any one else, who provided the Third Republic
with the history it required. To achieve that end, however, he had to remove the
towering figure of Hippolyte Taine from the field of revolutionary historiography.
Taine was the author of the monumental Les Origines de la France contemporaine.
Its eleven volumes were subdivided into three parts. Two volumes devoted to
L’Ancien Régime appeared in 1875. This was followed by six volumes on La
259 Ibid. 552.
260 Mélonio, ‘Introduction’ 149–88.
261 Ibid. 171.
262 For the centenary celebrations in 1889 a government subsidy was provided to republish
&nb
sp; Michelet’s history of the Revolution. On the emergence of this distinctively Third Republic analysis
of the Revolution see Paul Farmer, France Reviews its Revolutionary Origins (1944), 37–45.
286
History, Revolution, and Terror
Révolution, published in 1878–84 and three concluding volumes, La France mo-
derne, in 1891 and 1893. At the very moment of the Third Republic’s triumph,
Taine painted an unforgettable picture of the Revolution as nothing else but
bloodthirsty anarchy and horror.
As the controversy surrounding the publication of Quinet’s La Révolution
indicates, the 1860s saw no diminution in the importance attached to rival
interpretations of the Revolution. The year of the publication of Quinet’s history
also saw the appearance of the first volume of Ernest Hamel’s Histoire de Robespierre
d’après des papiers de famille, les sources originales et des documents entièrement
inédits.263 Claiming to be guided by a spirit of ‘impartiality’ and to be the first
study that provided a ‘day-by-day’ account of Robespierre’s life, its conclusion was
that posterity would one day place Robespierre ‘amongst the martyrs of humanity’.
In marked contrast, the middle years of the decade saw the publication of the first
volumes of Mortimer-Ternaux’s anti-revolutionary Histoire de la Terreur264 and of
Jules Sauzay’s heartfelt account of the Revolution’s attack upon the Church,
Histoire de la Persécution Révolutionnaire dans le département du Doubs de 1789 à
1801.265 Both were to be read by Taine. Then, in the aftermath of military defeat
and humiliation, came the Paris Commune, an event which, for some (including
Taine), bore a very unwelcome resemblance to the events of 1793. What this
violent and destructive episode revealed, Henri Wallon wrote in La Terreur, Études
critiques sur l’histoire (1873), was that the Terror required only a propitious
moment to make its return and that the ‘sinister’ people associated with it were
not ‘phantasms of the past’. Émile Montégut, writing in the prestigious Revue des
Deux Mondes,266 argued that the Commune demonstrated that ‘the bankruptcy of
the French Revolution’ was ‘an irrevocable and established fact’. Taine was to be of
a very similar opinion.
Any hope that the debate might diminish in intensity was dispelled as France