Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  All these leaders of the Revolution were young men; revolutions are seldom made by the old. Important as many of these leaders were, none of them, not even Robespierre, plays a dominating part in the great drama. Before the fact of the Revolution itself they seem to shrink; for the Revolution was not brought about, or even controlled, by them. It was one of those elemental human earthquakes which occur from time to time in history, and which social conditions and long-continued misery and despotism prepare, slowly but irrevocably.

  Do not imagine that the Convention did nothing except quarrel and guillotine. The energy released by a real revolution is always very great. Much of this was absorbed by the foreign wars, but still much remained, and a great deal of constructive work was done. In particular, the whole system of national education was overhauled. The Metric System, which every child in school learns now, was introduced then, and it simplified all weights and measures of length and volume. This system has spread now to most parts of the civilized world, but conservative England still sticks to an ancient out-of-date system of yards and furlongs and pounds and hundredweights and the like. We in India have to put up with these complicated lengths and weights as well as seers and maunds, etc.

  As a logical corollary to the metric system, there was a new republican calendar. It began from the day the Republic was proclaimed, September 22, 1792. The week of seven days was changed to a week of ten days, the tenth day being a holiday. There were twelve months still, but their names were changed. Fabre d’Eglantine, the poet, gave delightful new names to the months, in accordance with the season. The three spring months were Germinal, Floréal, Prairial; the summer months were Messidor, Thermidor, Fructidor; autumn came in Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire; and winter in Nivôse, Pluviôse, Ventôse. This calendar did not long survive the Republic.

  At one time there was a strong movement against Christianity and the worship of Reason was proposed. Temples of Truth were put up. The movement spread rapidly to the provinces. In November 1793 there was a great Fete of Liberty and Reason in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and a beautiful woman personified Reason. But Robespierre was conservative in such matters. He did not approve of this movement. Neither did Danton. The Jacobin Committee of Public Welfare was against it, and the leaders of the movement were therefore guillotined. There was no half-way house between power and the guillotine. As a counter-blast to the Fete of Liberty and Reason, Robespierre arranged another celebration—the Fete of the Supreme Being. By a vote of the Convention it was decided that France believed in a Supreme Being! The Roman Catholic religion crept back again into favour.

  After the crushing of the Paris sections and Commune, matters were rapidly coming to a head. The Jacobins were supreme; they controlled the government, but they were falling out among themselves. The guillotining of Hubert and his supporters, who had taken the lead in the Fete of Liberty and Reason, was the first big break in the Jacobin party. Fabre d’Eglantine followed; and when, early in 1794, Danton and Camille Desmoulins and others protested against Robespierre sending too many people to the guillotine, they themselves were struck down. The execution of Danton, in April 1794, carried out in a hurry lest the people should intervene, meant to the people of Paris and the provinces that the Revolution had ended. A lion of the Revolution had fallen, and a narrow clique was now in power. Surrounded by enemies, cut off from the people, this clique spotted treason everywhere and saw no other way of saving itself than to intensify the Terror.

  So the Terror grew worse and the tumbrils rolling to the guillotine were more crowded with victims than ever. In June a new law was passed, called the Law of the 22nd Prairial, which made it a crime, punishable by death, to spread false news to divide or stir up the people, to undermine morality and corrupt the public conscience. Everyone who differed from Robespierre and his henchmen could be caught in the wide net of this law. Large groups of persons were tried together and sentenced—as many as 150, a mixture of convicts, royalists and others, being tried together on one occasion.

  For forty-six days this new Terror lasted. At last, on the 9th Thermidor (July 27, 1794), the worm turned. The Convention suddenly turned against Robespierre and his supporters, and with cries of “Down with the tyrant”, they arrested them, and would not allow Robespierre even to speak. The next day the tumbril carried him to the guillotine where he had sent so many. Thus ended the French Revolution.

  After the fall of Robespierre came the counter-revolution. The Moderates came to the front, and these people now fell on the Jacobins and terrorized over them. After the Red Terror there came what is called the White Terror. Fifteen months later, in October 1795, the Convention broke up and a Directory of five members became the Government. This was definitely a bourgeois government, and it tried to keep down the common people. For over four years the Directory ruled France and, such was the prestige and strength of the Republic even after all the internal troubles, it carried on victorious war abroad. There were some insurrections against it, but they were put down. One of these was suppressed by a young general of the Republican Army, Napoleon Bonaparte, who dared to fire at the Paris crowd—this is famous as the “whiff of grapeshot”—and kill many of them. When the old Revolutionary Army could itself be used to kill the common people of France, then obviously there was no shadow of revolution left.

  So the Revolution ended, and many of the bright dreams of the idealists and the hopes of the poor ended with it. And yet it had gained much that it set out to gain. No counter-revolution could bring back serfdom again, and not even the Bourbon kings—the French dynasty was Bourbon—when they came back, could take back the land which had been distributed among the peasantry. The common man in the field or in the town was far better off than he had ever been before. Indeed, even during the Terror he was better off than before the Revolution. The Terror was not against him, but against the upper classes; though towards the end some of the poorer people also suffered under it.

  The Revolution fell, but the republican idea spread throughout Europe, and with it went the principles which had been proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

  103

  The Ways of Governments

  October 27, 1932

  I have not written for two weeks. I am afraid I grow slack. The thought that I am approaching the end of my story keeps me back a little. Already we are at the end of the eighteenth century; the 100 years of the nineteenth century await our inspection, and then we shall have just two and thirty years of the twentieth to bring us right up to today. But these 132 years that remain will take a lot of telling. Being quite’ near us, they loom large and fill our minds, and seem to us more important than earlier events. Much that we see around us today has its roots in these years, and indeed I shall have no easy task in leading you through the dense forest of events and happenings of the last century and more. Perhaps this is the reason why I shirk it! But I wonder also what I shall do when, at last, I bring this story of man to the year 1932, and the past merges into the present and stops before the shadow of the future. What shall I write to you then, my dear? What pretext shall I find to sit pen in hand and think of you, or imagine you sitting by me asking me many a question which I try to answer?

  Three letters I have written about the French Revolution—three long letters about five brief years in the history of France. During our journey through the ages we have taken centuries at a stride, and we have seen continents at a glance. But here in France, between the years 1789 and 1794, we have made a fairly lengthy stay; and yet you will be surprised to learn that I have tried very hard to be brief, for my mind was full of the subject and my pen wanted to run on. The French Revolution is important historically. It marks the end of an epoch and the beginning of another. But it fascinates even more by its dramatic character, and it teaches many a lesson to all of us. The world is today again in a ferment, and we are on the eve of great changes. In our own country we live in a period of revolution, however peaceful it may be. So we may learn much from the
French Revolution and from the other great revolution, which has taken place in Russia in our own day and almost before our eyes. Real revolutions of the people, like these two, cast a fierce light on the grim realities of life; like a flash of lightning they reveal the whole landscape, and especially the dark places. For a while at least the goal seems clearly visible and strangely near. Faith and energy fill one. Doubt and hesitation vanish. There is no question of compromise with the second best. Straight, like an arrow, the men who make the revolution go toward the goal, seeing neither to the right nor to the left; and the straighter and keener their vision the farther goes the revolution. But this occurs only during the high period of the revolution, when its leaders are on the mountain peaks and the masses are marching up the mountain side. But, alas! there comes a time when they have to come down from the mountains into the dark valleys below, and faith grows dim and energy grows less.

  In 1778 old Voltaire, who had been an exile almost all his life, came back to Paris to die. He was eighty-four years old then. Addressing the youth of Paris he said: “The young are fortunate; they will see great things.” Indeed they saw and took part in great things, for the Revolution broke out eleven years later. It had been kept waiting long enough. “L’état c’est moi”, had said Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque, in the seventeenth century; “Après moi le déluge”, said his successor, Louis XV, in the eighteenth; and after this invitation the deluge came and swept away Louis XVI and his company. Instead of the nobles with their powdered wigs and silken breeches, the “sansculottes”—the men without breeches—came to the front; and everybody in France was a “citoyen” or a “citoyenne.” “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” was the motto of the new Republic shouted out to the world.

  The Terror looms large in the days of the Revolution. In less than sixteen months, from the appointment of the special Revolutionary Tribunal to the fall of Robespierre, nearly 4000 persons were guillotined. That is a large number, and when one thinks that many an innocent person must have been sent to the guillotine, one is shocked and grieved. And yet it is well to remember certain facts, so that we may see the French Terror in its true perspective. The Republic was surrounded by enemies and traitors and spies, and many of those condemned to the guillotine were avowed opponents working for the destruction of the Republic. Toward the end of the Terror the innocent suffered with the guilty. When fear comes our vision is clouded, and it becomes difficult to distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. The French Republic had to face at a critical moment the opposition and treachery of some even of their own great generals, like Lafayette. It is no wonder that the nerve of the leaders failed them and they started hitting right and left indiscriminately.

  It is also well to remember, as H.G. Wells points out in his History, what was happening in those days in England and America and other countries. The criminal law, especially in defence of property, was savage, and people were hanged for trivial offences. In some places torture was still officially used. Wells says that far more people were hanged in this way in England and America than were sent to the guillotine under the Terror in France during the same period.

  Think again of the slave raids of those days with their horrible cruelty and inhumanity. Think also of war, modern war especially, which wipes off hundreds of thousands of young men in their prime. Come nearer, to our own country, and consider recent events. Thirteen years ago, on an April evening in Amritsar, the day of the spring festival, hundreds were done to death and thousands grievously wounded in the Jallianwala Bagh. And all the conspiracy cases and special tribunals and ordinances— what are they but attempts to terrorize and coerce a people? The intensity of repression and terrorism is a measure of the fear of a government. Every government, reactionary or revolutionary, alien or swadeshi, when it fears for its own existence, indulges in terrorism. The reactionary government does so on behalf of some privileged people and against the masses; the revolutionary government acts on behalf of the masses and against the privileged few. The revolutionary government is franker and more straightforward; it is often cruel and harsh, but there is little of subterfuge or deceit in it. The reactionary government lives in an atmosphere of deception, for it knows that it could not last if it were found out. It talks about liberty, and means thereby liberty for itself to do what it pleases. It talks of justice, and means by it the perpetuation of the existing order under which it flourishes, though others perish. Above all, it talks of law and order and, under cover of this phrase, shoots and kills and imprisons and gags and does every illegal and disorderly thing. In the name of “law and order” hundreds of our brethren have been tried by special tribunals and condemned to death. In this name, on an April day two and a half years ago in Peshawar, machine-guns shot down large numbers of our brave Pathan fellow-countrymen, unarmed as they were. And for this “law and order” the British Air Force drops bombs on our frontier villages and in Iraq, and kills or maims for life men and women and little children indiscriminately. Lest people should escape on the approach of an aeroplane, a fiendish ingenuity has devised what are called “time-delayed bombs”, which fall down apparently harmlessly and do not burst for a while. The men and women of the village, thinking that the danger is past, return to their homes, and soon afterwards the bombs burst and kill and destroy.

  Think also of the day-today terror of starvation which overshadows millions. We get used to the misery around us. We imagine that the workers and the peasants are a coarser lot than we are and not very sensitive to suffering. Vain arguments to still the pricking of our own consciences! I remember visiting a coal-mine in Jharia in Bihar, and I shall never forget the shock I had when I saw men and women working away far underneath the surface of the earth in long, black, dark corridors of coal. People talk of an eight-hour work-day for the mine-workers, and some even oppose this and think that more work should be got out of them. And when I hear or read these arguments, my mind goes back to that visit of mine to the black dungeons below where even eight minutes became a trial for me.

  The French Terror was a terrible thing. And yet it was a fleabite compared to the chronic evils of poverty and unemployment. The costs of social revolution, however great they might be, are less than these evils and the cost of war which comes to us from time to time under our present political and social system. The Terror of the French Revolution looms large because many titled and aristocratic persons were its victims, and we are so used to honouring the privileged classes that our sympathies go out to them when they are in trouble. It is well to sympathize with them as with others. But it is also well to remember that they are just a few. We may wish them well. But those who really matter are the masses, and we cannot sacrifice the many to a few. “’Tis the people that compose the human race,” writes Rousseau; “what is not people is so small a concern that it is not worth the trouble of counting.”

  I intended telling you of Napoleon in this letter. But my mind has wandered and my pen run on to other subjects, and Napoleon still awaits inspection. He must await our pleasure till the next letter.

  104

  Napoleon

  November 4, 1932

  Out of the French Revolution emerged Napoleon. France, Republican France, that had challenged and dared the kings of Europe, succumbed to this little Corsican. A strange, wild beauty had France then. A French poet, Barbier, has compared her to a wild animal, a proud and free mare, with head high and shining skin; a beautiful vagabond, fiercely intolerant of saddle and harness and rein, stamping on the ground, and frightening the world with the noise of her neighing. This proud mare consented to be ridden by the young man from Corsica, and he did many wonderful deeds with her. But he tamed her also and made the wild free thing lose all her wildness and freedom. And he exploited her and exhausted her till she threw him down and fell down herself.

  O Corse à cheveux plats! que la France était belle

  Au grand soleil de messidor!

  C’était une cavale indomptable et rebelle,

  Sa
ns frein d’acier, ni rénes d’or;

  Une jument sauvage à la coupe rustique,

  Fumante encore du sang des rois,

  Mais fière, et d’un pied fort heurtant le sol antique.

  Libre pour la première fois!

  Jamais aucune main n’avait passé sur elle

  Pour la flétrir et l’outrager;

  Jamais ses larges flancs n’avaient porté la selle

  Et le harnais de l’étranger;

  Tout son poil reluisait, et, belle vagabonde,

  L’oeil haut, la croupe en mouvement,

  Sur ses jarrets dressée, elle effrayait le monde

  Du bruit de son hennissement.

  What manner of man was Napoleon, then? Was he one of the great ones of the earth, the Man of Destiny, as he was called, a mighty hero and one who helped in freeing humanity from its many burdens? Or was he, as H.G. Wells and some others say, a mere adventurer and a wrecker, who did great injury to Europe and civilization? Probably both these views are exaggerated; probably both contain some measure of the truth. All of us are curious mixtures of the good and the bad, the great and the little. He was such a mixture, but, unlike most of us, extraordinary qualities went to make up this mixture. Courage he had and self-confidence and imagination and amazing energy and vast ambition. He was a very great general, a master of the art of war, comparable to the great captains of old—Alexander and Chengiz. But he was petty also, and selfish and self-centred, and the dominating impulse of his life was not the pursuit of an ideal, but the quest of personal power. “My mistress!” he once said, “Power is my mistress! The conquest of that mistress has cost me so much that I will allow no one to rob me of her, or to share her with me!” Child of the Revolution he was, and yet he dreamt of vast empire, and the conquests of Alexander filled his mind. Even Europe seemed small. The East lured him, and especially Egypt and India. “Only in the East,” he said, early in his career when he was twenty-seven, “have there been great empires and mighty changes; in the East where six hundred million people dwell. Europe is a mole-hill!”