began its preparations for the commemoration of the centenary of 1789. If the
central parts of Taine’s history were now in print, the period 1886–90 saw the
publication of over 100 new books on the Revolution.267 Dated 1 January, the first
to appear in 1889 was a work by the Bishop of Angers which, having dissected the
errors of revolutionary ideology, denounced the Revolution as ‘the most disastrous
event in our national history’.268 By way of response, a veritable deluge of articles,
brochures, reviews, biographies, and books sought to popularize the official message
that, despite regrettable excesses, the achievements of the Revolution were to be
celebrated and its heritage defended. Nevertheless, there was some very thin ice to
263 (1865). The next 2 vols. were publ. in 1866 and 1867.
264 7 vols. (1862–91). The message was that France had been saved despite the Terror.
265 6 vols. (1867–73).
266 ‘Où en est la Révolution française: simples notes sur la situation actuelle’, Revue des Deux
Mondes, 41 (5 Aug. 1871), 872–98.
267 For reviews of a selection of the books publ. during 1889 see ‘Bibliographie du centenaire’, La
Réforme sociale et le Centenaire de la Révolution (1889), 173–85.
268 Mgr Charles Freppel, La Révolution française à propos du centenaire de 1789 (1889), 139. Some
nine years earlier Mgr Freppel had written a preface to a remarkable book by P. Ubald de Chanday, Les
Trois Frances (1880). The France of the Revolution was categorized as ‘la France satanique’.
History, Revolution, and Terror
287
be skated over269 and, regardless of the statues unveiled, dinners enjoyed, ceremo-
nies held, and an Eiffel Tower built, the experience was by no means an unalloyed
success. The admirers of the revanchist General Boulanger could not be dissuaded
from describing the Republic as a ‘Bastille parlementaire’ that needed to be stormed
anew and the emerging socialist press complained repeatedly about a Revolution
betrayed by the bourgeoisie.270
Nor did calm return with the ending of the centenary. On 24 January 1891 the
Comédie-Française, the very pinnacle of the French theatrical establishment, gave
its first performance of a play by Victorien Sardou titled Thermidor. It told a simple
but controversial tale. The action took place on the eve of the fall of Robespierre
and brought together two old friends, Labussière and Martial Hugon, the former
recounting how, as a minor official in the bureau des détenus, he had sought to save
those who were innocent from execution. Recently returned from the front, Martial
was seeking to find his lover. As the action unfolds we see that neither man can save
her from the guillotine. Martial dies in the process and Labussière is reduced to
despair. At the heart of the play is a conversation between the two men that reveals
the gulf separating sincere and courageous republicans prepared to defend their
country from the Parisian and Jacobin world of denunciations, suspicion, and
cruelty. The question posed was whether such a world was worth fighting for?
For his pains Sardou was roundly denounced as a reactionary who had written a
reactionary play.271 However, the most significant (and subsequently famous)
response came only five days later when the radical parliamentary deputy Georges
Clemenceau stood before the parliamentary Chamber of Deputies and there
denounced those on the right who, in his view, sought to mutilate the legacy of
the Revolution. ‘Messieurs’, he proclaimed, ‘whether we wish it or not, whether it
pleases or shocks us, the French Revolution is a block, a block from which nothing
can be severed because historical truth does not permit it.’272 In brief, to support
the Third Republic was to accept the Revolution, to endorse the principles of 1789,
and to sanction the Terror. To do otherwise was to support the Revolution’s
enemies and to challenge the republican message that the Revolution constituted
the founding moment of modern France. In that same year, Taine expressed the
contrary view that it was Napoleon Bonaparte who had made modern France.273
Hippolyte Taine was one of the great literary figures of the second half of the
nineteenth century.274 Born in 1828, in the years before the Paris Commune he
269 It proved difficult to come to an agreement about which dates were to be celebrated.
270 See Marc Angenot, Le Centenaire de la révolution: 1889 (1989) and Pascal Ory, ‘Le Centenaire
de la Révolution française’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire (1984), i. 465–92.
271 See e.g. Edmond Bourgeois, Thermidor: Réponse à la pièce de Victorien Sardou (1891). For a
contrary view see Ernest Desmarest, Thermidor et la pièce de M. Sardou (1891). Sardou’s play was
quickly removed from the stage.
272 Quoted in Bétourné and Hartig, Penser l’histoire de la Révolution (1989), 94 n. 1.
273 Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1900–2), i. 4.
274 Given the precipitous decline in Taine’s reputation relatively little recent scholarship has been
devoted to him: however, see Susanna Barrows, ‘Hippolyte Taine and the Spectre of the Commune’,
Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., 1981),
73–92, and Eric Gasparini, La Pensée politique d’Hippolyte Taine: Entre traditionalisme et libéralisme
(Aix-en-Provence, 1993).
288
History, Revolution, and Terror
published works on English literature,275 Italian, Flemish, and Greek art, French
philosophy,276 and human psychology.277 For good measure, he also published a
novel and accounts of his travels. Elected a member of the Académie Française,
Taine was appointed professor of aesthetics at the École des Beaux-Arts. Like
Tocqueville, Taine turned late to the writing of history and he too failed to
complete the masterpiece that, for good or ill, was to define his reputation.278
Like Tocqueville, he studied the past primarily to understand the present and its
many discontents.
No republican, Taine greeted the Franco-Prussian war with ill-disguised fore-
boding. This turned to horror and despair with the inauguration of the Paris
Commune on 17 March 1871. ‘I am very sad and very discouraged’, he wrote to
his mother four days later; ‘the future looks very black, but what is worse, it is
impossible to know what lays hidden beneath this darkness’.279 Not long after-
wards he concluded that it was to be ‘a return to barbarism and the dangers of
primitive anarchy’, describing Paris as ‘a pandemonium’.280 In May 1871 Taine
left for England and it was in the Oxford University library that he learnt of the
fighting in Paris. The defeated Communards, he wrote to his wife, were miserable
wretches, savage wolves, brigands who placed themselves beyond the pale of
humanity.281 No sooner was he back in Paris than he began the long and laborious
research for Les Origines de la France contemporaine, convinced that to comprehend
the current disorder it was necessary to return to the crisis of the ancien régime and
to the Revolution. This was the issue that was to preoccupy him for the best part of
the next twenty years until his death in 1893.
Taine
had made his reputation through the application of scientific method to
fields previously dominated by the traditions of classical studies. His most famous
statement of this commitment came in the introduction to his Histoire de la
littérature anglaise of 1863.282 He there argued that, in the course of the previous
century, the writing of history had been revolutionized, first through the extension
of historical imagination,283 and then through the use of observation and experi-
ment to understand the inner psychology of human beings. According to this
methodology, the actions of individuals or groups of persons were as amenable to
causal explanation as any event in the natural world. As Taine famously remarked:
‘No matter if the facts be physical or moral: they all have their causes; there is a
cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for digestion, for muscular
movement, for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products just like vitriol and
275 Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 4 vols. (1863–4).
276 Les Philosophes français du XXe siècle (1857).
277 De l’Intelligence, 2 vols. (1870).
278 Alfred Cobban said of Taine that he was ‘perhaps the greatest of bad historians’: ‘Hippolyte
Taine, Historian of the French Revolution’, History, 53 (1968), 331.
279 H. Taine: Sa vie et correspondance (1905), iii. 68.
280 Ibid. 75.
281 Ibid. 128–9.
282 Histoire de la littérature anglaise, i, pp. i–xlviii. See also the Preface to Taine’s Essais de Critique et
d’Histoire (1858), pp. i–xv.
283 By way of example, Taine cited Lessing, Walter Scott, Chateaubriand, Thierry, and Michelet.
History, Revolution, and Terror
289
sugar.’284 Taine further specified that the three primary determinants of human
behaviour were ‘la race, le milieu, le moment’285 and that these provided the key to
an understanding of the mental habits of a people. The writing of history, therefore,
was not primarily narration but a form of applied psychology.286
Upon their appearance in 1875, the first volumes of Les Origines de la France
contemporaine greatly displeased monarchist opinion for there was described a
venal Church, an ornamental nobility, and a vain and arbitrary monarchy. They
also provided a portrayal of a people brutalized by misery and ignorance, prone to
displays of blind rage, and of limited political capacity. ‘Every object’, Taine
wrote, ‘appears to them in a false light. They are like children who, at every turn
of the road, see in each tree or bush, some frightful apparition.’287 However,
those same volumes also began the description of a ‘spirit and doctrine’ which
Taine took to be distinctively French and which, in his view, provided the
ideological driving force of the Revolution. While the esprit classique that had
underpinned French civilization had been held in check by religious belief and by
the authority of the monarchy, Taine argued, it had produced such wonders as
the gardens of Versailles, but, set free from these restraints, as the eighteenth
century progressed it had generated an entirely abstract and rational conception
of man and, from this, a vision of politics based upon mathematical models. The
philosophy of the eighteenth century, Taine wrote, resembled a religion: it had
‘the same impetus of faith, hope, and enthusiasm, the same spirit of propaganda
and domination, the same severity and intolerance, the same ambition to recast
man and to remodel all human life according to a preconceived plan’.288
Taine’s rejoinder to this simplified logic, to what he termed ‘la raison raison-
nante’, was to outline an entirely different vision of the human condition. ‘Not
only’, Taine wrote, ‘is reason not natural to man or universal in humanity, but in
the conduct of man its influence is small.’289 In most cases, our actions were guided
by ‘physical temperament, bodily needs, animal instinct, hereditary prejudice,
imagination’ and, above all, ‘personal self-interest’.290 Nor was it correct to imagine
that people were naturally good. In human beings there was ‘an enduring substra-
tum of brutality and ferocity, of violent and destructive instincts’.291 Given the
paucity of resources provided by an ‘intractable earth’, our constant preoccupation
was ‘to acquire, to amass, to possess’. Finally, our fertile minds were such as to turn
our incessant dreams into ‘monstrous chimeras’ and to exaggerate our ‘fears, hopes,
and desires’. From this arose, ‘especially if he were French’, sudden outbursts of
emotion, irresistible passions, epidemics of credulity and suspicion, enthusiasm and
panic.292 These, Taine argued, were the ‘brute forces which governed human life’.
In normal circumstances they remained hidden but the truth was that, like a flood,
the havoc and destruction they caused were only restrained by an equal force. ‘To
control and limit their blows’, Taine wrote, ‘various mechanisms are employed: a
284 Histoire de la littérature anglaise, i, p. xv.
285 Ibid., pp. xxii–xxiii.
286 Ibid., p. xliii.
287 Origines de la France contemporaine, ii. 277.
288 Ibid. 2.
289 Ibid. 59.
290 Ibid. 60.
291 Ibid.
292 Ibid. 61.
290
History, Revolution, and Terror
pre-established constitution, the division of powers, a code of laws, tribunals and
legal formalities. Behind all these wheels of government always appears the final
appeal, the efficient instrument, namely the gendarme armed against the savage, the
brigand, the madman that each of us conceals, asleep or enchained, but always
alive, in the recesses of his own breast.’293
The problem with the ‘new theory’, Taine continued, was that all its principles
and precepts were directed against the gendarme. In the name of the sovereignty
of the people, government was deprived of all authority, initiative, and power.
Yet, by the same token, it also led to ‘the unlimited dictatorship of the State’.294
A new contract, agreed upon by perfectly free and equal individuals, was deemed
to supersede all other contracts and all other claims to rights—be they those
of property, family, or Church—were as naught before the new State. In the
‘democratic convent’ modelled on Sparta and Rome, ‘the individual is noth-
ing’.295 What would this mean when theory was put into practice? ‘The dogma
of the sovereignty of the people, when interpreted by the crowd’, Taine wrote,
‘will produce perfect anarchy, until such point when, interpreted by its leaders,
it will produce a perfect despotism.’296 This, in Taine’s view, was exactly what
had occurred in the Revolution.
In the most marvellously expressive prose, Taine described the descent of France
into ‘spontaneous anarchy’. What began in 1789 was the very dissolution of
society. The craving for bread degenerated into murder and incendiarism, the
people acting like a ‘blind colossus’. As the fermentation increased, the agitators
sat in permanent session, the ‘dictatorship of the mob’ striking out at anything that
resisted it. The dregs of society came to the surface. ‘Like a tame el
ephant which
suddenly becomes wild again’, Taine wrote, ‘in a flourish the people throw off their
ordinary keeper and the new guides that it tolerates perched on its neck are there
simply for show; henceforth, it will move along as it pleases, freed from their
control, and guided by its own feelings, instincts, and appetites.’297 The storming
of the Bastille was nothing else but an example of how popular insurrection turned
frenzy into ferocity. Scarcely had the gates been entered than the work of destruc-
tion began. ‘Suddenly’, Taine announced, ‘we see spring forth the barbarian, still
worse, the primitive animal, the grinning, sanguinary and lustful ape, who chuckles
while he kills and gambols over the ruins he has created.’298 Such, Taine wrote, was
the ‘actual government’ to which France had been given up.
For page upon page, chapter upon chapter, Taine continued in similar vein, the
tone only changing when he described how the National Assembly, operating like
‘an academy of utopians’ rather than a ‘legislature of practitioners’,299 began the
process of turning spontaneous anarchy into ‘legal anarchy’.300 With great obstina-
cy it had refused to consider the ‘real man’ before its very eyes and had persisted in
writing a constitution for ‘the abstract beings found in books’. It was ‘a masterpiece
of speculative reason and of practical unreason’.301 Meanwhile, the people set about
293 Origines de la France contemporaine, 62.
294 Ibid. 65.
295 Ibid. 68.
296 Ibid. 65.
297 Ibid. iii. 61.
298 Ibid. 84.
299 Ibid. iv. 44.
300 Ibid. 47.
301 Ibid.
History, Revolution, and Terror
291
‘the voluntary destruction of property’. It was this passion, Taine wrote, that gave
the Revolution its ‘enduring energy, its primary impulse’.302
It was from this ‘social decomposition’ that the Jacobins emerged and, like
‘mushrooms out of compost’, began the conquest of power. Their programme,
Taine recognized, amounted to the regeneration of society and of man. The vehicle
of this ‘liberating operation’ was to be ‘an omnipotent State’ exercising unlimited
jurisdiction. No freedom was to be left to the individual. Again the quality of
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