LITERARY NOTICES. 



561 



is the old, popular, easy way, which nearly 

 all the English historians have followed un- 

 til very recent tiir.es. In France, Montes- 

 quieu was probably the first great writer 

 w T ho saw that the schoolmaster's idea of his- 

 tory, as a series of dates, and the merely 

 literary man's idea of history, like Carlyle's, 

 as a succession of tableaux, were alike in- 

 sufficient. Burckhardt, in his recent his- 

 tory of the " Italiau Renaissance,'' seized the 

 true idea ; to discriminate, namely, the im- 

 portant lines of tendency in the given era, 

 and to group the facts which bear upon each 

 line, whether causally or consequentially. 

 Burckhardt has pushed the method perhaps 

 too far, making his work as much a group 

 of essays as a history. But M. Taine keeps 

 to clearly discriminable phases of the move- 

 ments which made up the great Revolution ; 

 as indicated, for instance, in the book-di- 

 visions of these two volumes : I. " Sponta- 

 neous Anarchy"; II. "The Constituent 

 Assembly " ; III. " The Application of the 

 Constitution"; TV. "The Jacobin Con- 

 quest." 



We have dwelt thus long upon M. 

 Taine's method because it is a feature which 

 has been appreciated, so far as we know, 

 by none of his critics in America a coun- 

 try little given to historical studies ; and, 

 also, because that method is clearly asso- 

 ciated with modern English philosophy. It 

 remains to ask what M. Taine's conclusions 

 are upon a theme which has occupied and 

 baffled so many English historians before 

 him. 



As a visible thing the French Revolution 

 began with the dearth of crops in 17S8-'S9. 

 The " Reign of Terror " included the sis- 

 teen months from March, 1793, to July, 

 1791. The Revolution ended in October, 

 1795, with the suppression, by Napoleon, of 

 the insurrection of the sections against the 

 Convention. The present narrative includes 

 , the events of 1792. Under the old regime, 

 two acres out of every five in France, as 

 Voltaire expressed it, were in the hands of 

 the clergy ; and those two acres were gen- 

 erally the best of the five. A half of the 

 peasant's earnings, or more, went to the 

 church, the nobility, and the state. That 

 was the substantial grievance which pre- 

 pared the way for the Revolution. But 

 other countries have had equally substantial 

 vol. xx. 36 



grievances without any subsequent revolu- 

 tion. What, then, determined the Revolu- 

 tion of 1789? 



By far the most important second cause, 

 as a determinant, was a single book, Rous- 

 seau's " Contrat Social." That book was a 

 triumph of the literary method in social 

 science ; it made the worse appear the bet- 

 ter reason, and with such lucidity, such fatal 

 persuasiveness, as even France had never 

 known before. In a few words the orators 

 the mass of the people could not read 

 had made its principles familiar throughout 

 Fiance. The " Social Contract " defines the 

 modern citizen by " eliminating the dif- 

 ferences which distinguish a Frenchman 

 from a Papuan, a modern Englishman from 

 a Briton in the time of Caesar. The result- 

 ing essence is very meager : it is ' a being 

 with a desire to be happy and the faculty 

 of reasoning ' " after Jean Jacques Rous- 

 seau. The French agitators consider the 

 nation as composed of twenty-six millions 

 of equal, free, and independent entities of 

 this description, without obligations, insti- 

 tutions, or history ; and free at any moment 

 to make a social contract, de novo, of their 

 own. Physical oppression, followed by this 

 intellectual hallucination, disintegrated the 

 most elaborate social structure of modern 

 times. The fabric stood after it had lost 

 the power to sustain itself, awaiting the first 

 chance shock to topple it over. That shock 

 was given by the failure of the crops in 

 1788, and the consequent half-starvation of 

 the laboring-classes. The Revolution, begun 

 in moderation, went rapidly on to madness; 

 the power fell into the vilest hands. The 

 general course of events is summarized in 

 M. Taine's comparison as follows : 



" A workman, overtaxed, in misery and 

 badly fed, takes to drink. After a few years 

 his nervous system, already weakened by 

 spare diet, becomes over-excited, out of bal- 

 ance. An hour comes when the brain, un- 

 der a sudden stroke, ceases to direct the 

 machine; each limb, acting separately and 

 for itself, starts convulsively . Meanwhile, 

 the man thinks himself a millionaire, or a 

 king; he sings and shouts; he drinks more 

 than ever. At last his face grows dark ; 

 radiant visions give way to monstrous phan- 

 toms ; he sees nothing but menacing figures, 

 murderers ready to cut his throat. Then. 



