15 OCTOBER 1910, Page 23

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.*

IT is with a very deep and genuine pleasure that we welcome these volumes, and make them known to the Englisb public, by whom, we trust, they may be read widely, with all the sympathy and understanding which they deserve. France in the present is our best and closest friend, as well as our nearest neighbour, and her historical connexion with us is even closer than her geographical. Scandinavians, who had become French, conquered and ruled us : "smote us into greatness," as Mr. William Watson sang so finely; roused out of their Germanic lethargy our dull predecessors, dediti somno eiboque. For many ages it was uncertain whether England was to be a French province, or to be the head of an Imperial Confederation that included France. French was the lan- guage of law and government down to Edward III., and it is improbable that the Kings before him knew any English. Chaucer may laugh at Cockney French, but the language in which he does it is tinged by the French of his own greater world. The wars which we associate with Crecy and Agin- court were in truth only quarrels between different branches of the same Royal House, and the golden lilies in our coat-of- arms outlived the French Monarchy. It is even more signifi- cant that in our quartering they took precedence of the Plantagenet leoplirds, which were promoted into lions. Our later wars were rather for trade and colonies than through national antipathy, because during the intervals of peace both nations invariably fraternised and copied one another. Our literature shows many traces of the process, which was always to our advantage artistically; and our philosophers of the seventeenth century were the acknowledged masters of those great men, especially of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who became the intellectual fathers of the Revolution.

But the Revolution itself, for which English thinkers and

institutions are so largely responsible, is even yet very generally misunderstood, and therefore misjudged, by Englishmen. There are few terms, perhaps, which stir more diverse feelings than the words "French Revolution." To myriads of human beings they are the symbol of hope and progress, the assertion of an ardent faith; to many others they are synonymous with everything that is destructive and execrable. Among ourselves, probably, they still convey to the average man a dim and furtive sense of the guillotine, of executions, terror, pillage, of exceeding violence and injustice, of the great deeps of human society broken up and all its fiercer passions unchained, of a beheaded King and Queen, of nobles and ecclesiastics banished or massacred. So far as it goes, that notion is true; for all .these things did happen, and for many of the actors in them no extenuation of any sort is possible; but this truth is not the whole truth. We have a right to condemn as the vilest of mankind the bulk of the revolutionaries, but, parodoxical as it may sound, we must not condemn the Revolution. In getting rid of the swim rigime it did an incalculable service to humanity.

M. Alphonse Aulard, with his vast, minute, unrivalled knowledge of the French Revolution, is now available in our own language to remove from us the danger of misunder- standing the Revolution, and to explain the greatest event which has happened in the social and political progress of the modern world. These high praises require that we should examine his credentials.

M. Aulard is a Professor in the Faculty of Letters in the

University of Paris. He is the author of many historical works, all of the highest quality and value. He was a large contributor, on the subject of the Revolution, to the great Histcrire Oinerale du lye &bele a Nos .Tours, edited by MM. Lavisse and Rambaud. He has published five volumes of Etudes et Lecons sur la Rgvolution Francaise, which examine various details and phases of it. There is another volume on Le Cults de la Baisou et le Culte de l'Etre Supr6me, in which he distinguishes matters that are far too often confused together. Not least, _there is also Tame, Historien de la Revolution Franfaise. Finally, there is M. A.ulard's magnum opus, in every sense, the Histoire Politique de la Revolution Francaise : Origines ef Developpement de la Dgmoeratie et de la Be'publique. It is a great work in its subject, by its treatment, and in its size. In the original it Pima a quarto volume in smallish print of eight hundred and five pages. This is what * The French. _Revolution: a Political History, 1789-1804. By A. Aulard. Tram. lated by Bernard ?Call. 4 las. London; T. Fisher Unwin. Ps. 6d. set each.]

Mr. /Call has translated; and his four volumes octavo, in good print, amount to one thousand four hundred and sixteen pages. The work proclaims itself solid by the right of bulk. Let us add, at once, that it asks for solid and serious readers. We would say, even more emphatically, that it deserves them.

M. Aulard writes a clear, grave, sound, equable French. He is as sober in expression as he is in thought and judgment. He is rather a thoroughly good workman than a great artist in style. Or perhaps he shows his art best by suiting it so exactly to his subject. If there are no high flights, there are no fancies either, in his words and thoughts. There is no oratory, because there is neither passion nor prejudice in his presentation of the ease. He is as impersonal and calm as a Judge should be in summing up. The facts are presented with lucidity and truth, with impressive and cumulative weight ; but they are allowed to speak for themselves. For all these reasons, M. Aulard not only can be translated faith- fully into sound, sober, and workmanlike English, but he can be rendered without any loss into our language, if his trans- lator have an adequate knowledge of French and a sufficient mastery of English ; and Mr. Miall has made a. sound, sober, and workmanlike translation of M. Aulard. His work is not without blemishes : what work of nearly fifteen hundred closely printed pages could be ? But there are not, we think, many positive errors in Mr. Miall's rendering ; though we find some awkwardnesses of phrase, which, if they do not actually mis- represent the French, are unkind and Violent to our English. Mr. Mall is to be congratulated on the whole upon his translation. Perhaps in many cases it would have been better to keep more strictly to English terms. For instance, "the Duke of Orleans" would be unexceptionable, but "the Due" is questionable and irritating.

Besides translating, Mr. Miall has provided a large number of biographical notes dealing with the chief characters. These will prove most useful to many English readers. They are not all quite unimpeachable, nor are they equal in execu- tion, but they are all trustworthy and sound in spite of some slight blemishes. For instance, the Comte d'Artois is called "the Due" (IV. 27), and the death of Louis XVIII is given as occurring in September, 1829, instead of 1824. The sketch of Louis XVIII. is perhaps the most defective. It omits what was really good in him, his wit and scholarship; and what was least good, his questionable and factious behaviour in early days to Louis XVI. as Dauphin and as a new King. Still more extraordinary and unfortunate is the omission of Talleyrand, by far the most interesting French personage of the time, and certainly not the least famous or influential. In addition to these notes, there is a full summary of events. Mr. Miall has also written a long preface, which is perhaps dubious in some of its conclusions, and he has provided a full index of names, with a supplementary index of subjects. Altogether, he has produced a laborious and creditable work, and every English student who does not know M. Aulard already will be the better for reading it. We should not omit our due thanks to Mr. Fisher Unwin for venturing upon so large and costly an undertaking. We hope his four volumes will have a big private circulation; and still more that they will find their way, as they deserve, into every educational and public library throughout the whole British Empire and the United States, for they are indispensable as a work of reference.

Let us, in conclusion, say briefly why ; and we must begin by returning to M. Aulard. He has given more than twenty years to research as well as to writing and lecturing about his subject. He has gone to the original and contemporary documents, which no one else probably knows half so well.

From this evidence, which cannot be explained away, he has constructed his history, with the impartiality and accuracy of the facts themselves. The result is very different from our general English notion, and from our most popular expression of it. Carlyle is ne doubt a prophet,. fervent, lurid; but with more heat than light, irritating and.

worse when one desires facts and elearnees. For these things one should not go to a prophet. What Carlyle does not bring out with sufficient clearness is the untrustworthiness of Louis,

the violence and the foreign sympathies of the Queen, the intrigues of both nobles and clergy, the inuninent danger of rebellion and invasion, of savage and implacable reaction, which wherever it did happen was merciless. The crimes and

atrocities of the Revolution were by no means all on one side. M. Aulard brings out, on the other hand, the beneficent and liberating forces which led to the Revolution, as well as the miserable causes which provoked it, and made its tragedies inevitable. But, after all, it is the high tragedy of the whole event which transfigures for us so many even of the more violent and culpable actors. As Mr. Manning has said so wittily and elegantly in the most inimitable of his Scenes and Portraits, "Humanity in the lump is a beast more terrible than any in the Revelation" :—

" no!" cried Ronan, with a sudden vivacity. " There is the

chief glory of the human race. They will sacrifice themselves for an impossible ideal. None of us can contemplate that great tragedy of the French Revolution without feeling cleansed by it. The enthusiasm of the people has a kind of terrible grandeur. In such moments of divine delirium all men assume heroic pro- portions. We may pity it for its fanaticism ; we may pity it for being so easily duped ; but it is impossible to deny its magnificent devotion to an ideal."

That ideal is working out, surely, inevitably, beneficently. It has created modern France,—the soundest, the most stable, as well as the most civilised of Continental countries. Most of its domestic reactionaries are disappearing, overcome by coups de liberte ; and already prepared, we may hope, for that appeasing and reconciling policy which her present Government is advocating.

We should remember that our turbulent nobility had vanished in the Wars of the Roses. Henry VIII. had cleared out the monks. Elizabeth had checkmated the Papacy. Laud and our Episcopate were not supported by a dangerous and cruel international hierarchy. Our own Revolution was neither complicated nor embittered by any serious foreign danger and interference, nor had the English people been brutalised by centuries of injustice and gross misgovernment. The nation was left to settle its own accounts in its own way. Moreover, Napoleon only appeared after the Revolutionary factions had got out of hand, after their leaders had committed the worst excesses; but Cromwell was influential in our Revolution from the first, and was always strong enough to keep it from any dangerous extravagance. Yet we had to take the head of one faithless King, to expel another, and to deal very sternly with theological fanaticism and political theorisers. We should rather bless our good fortune than blame our French kinsmen indiscriminately ; though no blame can be too great for both Clerical and Jacobinical fanaticism, and for the inhuman atrocities of some of the Revolutionary leaders and their tools.

Let us profit, then, in our own present by the experiences of France : recognising the danger of uprooting Constitutional foundations, and of playing too lightly with first principles, which are the most explosive of all things. And may we never forget that tyranny may come, and has come, from below in forms which are far more disastrous and irrevocable than any misgovernment and oppression from above.