REVOLUTION AND REACTION IN MODERN FRANCE.*
THE oscillations of the political pendulum that was set in motion by the overthrow of the Ancien Regime in France, and its passage between tbe poles of Revolution and Reaction,-- that is the subject which Mr. Lowes Dickinson has undertaken to explain for English readers in a form at once short and comprehensive. The attempt is a difficult one, but it is not too much to say that Mr. Dickinson has succeeded. We know of no book by means of which a person of intelligence, unacquainted with French history, could so easily be made to understand the causes and the general drift of the French Revolution. In spite of its shortness, the book is alive with interest, and in reading it we experience none of that feeling of oppression which belongs to the Abstract. Mr. Dickinson avoids, with great skill, the curse of most small books on great subjects. He is not always talking about things and never letting us see the things themselves. Wherever possible, he brings us face to face with what is concrete and real, and avoids abstrac- tions. For example, when he wants to show how entirely at variance were the preaching and the practice of the Revolu- tion, he is not content to tell us so in general terms of long- winded rhetoric. Instead, he quotes the very words of the Declaration of Rights on which the Revolution was founded, and then puts in contrast to them extracts from the laws and decrees of the Convention, or from the speeches of the Revo- lutionary leaders. To say that a set of men did not act up to their principles, leaves the reader cold and untouched. It has a very different effect to tell him how the Declara- tion of Rights laid it down as a fundamental truth, that "no one can be accused, arrested, or detained, except in the cases determined by the law, and according to the forms it has prescribed ; " and yet how the Convention set up a Revolutionary Tribunal which was emancipated from the usual forms of law, took cognisance of indefinite political offences ; and passed the law of " suspects," which made "sus- pects" triable by the Revolutionary Tribunal, and defined a " suspect " as "any one who has shown himself a partisan of tyranny or federation; any one who cannot prove that he has performed his civic duties ; those of the ci-devarat nobles who have not constantly given evidence of their attachment to the Revolution ; public officials who have been suspended or dis- missed either by the Convention or by its commissioners, and have not been reinstated." By this means, we get really close to the spirit which prevailed during the Revolution, and do not see merely a reflection of a reflection.
To read Mr. Dickinson's account of the hundred years of Revolution and Reaction through which modern France has passed, is to realise that the evil effects of the Revolution were due to three things. First must be named the inability of the French temperament to understand and accept a compromise. The French are unable to act in that ad- mirable spirit which has always enabled the English Whigs
to say to the English Radicals You want to go the whole way to Windsor, while we only want to go as far as Hounslow. Never mind that, however. As long as we can, let us keep together." Such an agreement would be an abomination alike to the French Moderate and the French Radical. Neither will * Revolution and Reaction. in Modern France, By G. town Dickinson, ILA., Fellow of King's aolloge, Oandaridge. London: Goorgo Allen. 1892. agree to move an inch in company with the other till it has been made clear that their goals are identical Next and allied to this is the French love of what is logical and exact, It is impossible to read French history and not to be always exclaiming, with Hamlet, "How absolute the knave- is 1" There must be no give and take, no making the- best of things. It is for ever aut Ctesar ant nullus. If the
reformer cannot have everything arranged in a precise, comprehensive scheme of amelioration, he will have nothing to do with reform. In the same way, the Conservative will not lift a finger to save an institution unless it can be saved entire. "Slut ut aunt ant non sint." " pet them be as they are, or let them perish altogether." A touch of the spirit which pervades the famous Irish "bull," and which prompted Sir Boyle Roche to declare that "a part, nay, the- whole, of the Constitution should be sacrificed to preserve the remainder," might have saved France an infinity of woe; but that touch is never forthcoming. As Burke pointed out of the Jacobins :—" They would rather domineer in a parish of atheists, than rule the whole Christian world." The this& political difficulty which France has encountered rests in thee fact that no Frenchman ever seems to feel the necessity which' made the Duke of Wellington declare "that the Queen's. Government must be carried on," even if those who carried it on were forced to swallow their most cherished political opinions. No French Reactionary would loyally serve the Republic, and carry Radical legislation, in order that the- State should be saved from a violent crisis. In truth, these- difficulties all spring from one souree,—the division of France into social and intellectual divisions, between which there is neither the sympathy of approbation nor that of comprehension. The noblesse socially keep almost entirely apart from those who are not noble by birth, or have not been, as it were, adopted into the noble caste as a reward for support rendered to the interests of the noblesse. In a still more marked degree, the- ideas of one set of men suffer no modification by contact with
the ideas of another set. The only regime—that of Louis Philippe—based on a compromise of ideas ever tried in France,.
had not a friend, and was so ridiculously weak, that it only. lasted its eighteen years by a sort of miracle. It was so' feeble, that it was literally shouted out of existence by the first mob that cared to challenge its right to rule. France, in a word, is a mixture of two chemical elements which' will not amalgamate, and which every now and then.
show their essential hostility by an explosion. But though' this has been the history of the past hundred years, there seems some hope that the future may be less stormy. The pendulum is swinging less widely than it did, and the notion that all compromise is treason, all opposition rebellion,, seems dying out. Who knows but that in time, "the Govern- ment which divides us least" may become "the Government which unites us all"?
This working of this idea, that all compromise is treason,. all opposition rebellion, is to be traced on every page of Mr. Dickinson's book. We cannot, however, trace it here, but shall give instead a passage from his concluding chapter. 11; is an excellent example of his vigorous and thoughtful style, and will prove to the reader that we have not taken by any- means too favourable a view of his book :— "The title 'Republic,' in fact, does not signify in Franca any unusual measure of liberty, nor any extreme application of demo- cratic institutions ; what it does signify, is a break in continuity r it is the method, rather than the result, that distinguishes France from England, and in politics the method is at least as important as the end ; for while it is often said, and still more often believed, that the end justifies the means, it is much truer, and much more frequently illustrated, that the means destroy the end. The whole history of modern France is a comment on this text; it was her fate, rather than her choice, to adopt the method of force ; and. what has been the result ? After nine changes in the form of government, seven violent revolutions, and two occupations by a foreign enemy, rent into fractions from within, shorn of her pro- vinces from without, having slaughtered, proscribed, and alienated section after section of her population, she has attained at length,. under the name of the Republic, a measure of liberty confessedly neither so full nor so secure as that which has been evolved, almost without shock, under the English Monarchy. Such lathe material achievement of the Refolutionarymethod ; and not less remark- able has been its effect on the political character of the nation: of parties it has made factions, of governments, tyrants, of oppo- nents, conspirators : those constant and happily complementary types, the Radical and the Tory, it has exaggerated into their sinister caricatures, the Jacobin and the Reactionist ; each in turn the fury of which the other is the prey, they fly or pursue, alter- nate, in their shifting dance of death ; each a fanatic, one of tlio,
future, the other of the past, one of the inadequate idea, the other of the imperfect fact, both universalising their own conception to an absolute and peremptory law, in their passion for the 'what,' indifferent to the 'who' or the 'how' or the when,' claiming universal suffrage as a means to the tyranny of a sect, and com- bining to annihilate their adversaries as a prelude to annihilating one another, confused in proportion to their shallow lucidity and dishonest in proportion to their tense and acrid real, seeing in themselves no less than society and in society no more than them- selves, now in power and now in opposition, but everywhere and always ominous and disastrous, they have proclaimed themselves, alike by their words, their methods, and their ideal, the curse of the mother-country they claim to represent and the ruin of the civilisation they profess to regenerate or to save : bred, in the beginning, of revolution, in their turn they engender it ; against them, throughout the century, the Moderates struggle in vain."
This quotation leads us to the first of the two unfavourable remarks we must make in regard to Mr. Dickinson's book. His sentences are often of a length which would have /made even Milton feel ashamed. It is by no means uncommon to find but three full-stops on a page. No doubt the sense is always clear, for the pause is there, though
-the full-point is not. This excuse, however, is only an aggrava- tion of the offence. Mr. Dickinson could easily have rested
our eyes and minds, if he had chosen, by turning semi-colons into full-stops, and yet he has deliberately refused to do so. One more complaint, and we have done. Mr. Dickinson, on one or two occasions, gives quotations without references. That is a very grave mistake in a history book ; and if his work goes into the second edition, which it most undoubtedly deserves, he will do well to see that his authorities are always given. With this much of grumbling, we must take leave of a book which no one who wishes to clear his mind on the political history of France should omit to read.
Previous page
