Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France. Georg Brandes
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in this same tone. However divided the Convention might be upon other questions, upon this there was absolute unanimity. Marked as is the difference in the nation's frame of mind during, and after, the Reign of Terror, there is no difference in its attitude towards Catholicism. When, as one result of the proclamation of religious liberty, a few churches had been reopened, the fact was announced by the weekly paper Le Décade Philosophique, under the heading "Theatres," in the following terms: "On the 18th and 25th of this month a comedy was played in several parts of Paris. The chief character, in an absurd costume, performed a variety of foolish antics, at which the spectators did not laugh. As we are not in the habit of criticising revived plays when they are neither useful nor instructive, we shall take no further notice of this one."
Mirabeau had said that men's first aim must be "to decatholicise" France. To all appearance this was being done. One Commune after another petitioned to be allowed to change its name, which was almost always that of some saint. Saint-Denis, for instance (whose headless patron never existed), was renamed Franciade. Most of the provinces followed the example of Paris. Nothing that could remind men of the "kingdom by the grace of God" was spared. In 1793 a venerable, white-bearded Alsatian, a member of the Committee of Public Safety, Ruhl by name, managed to get possession of the sacred, miracle-working ampulla containing the anointing oil which a dove had brought down from heaven on the occasion of the coronation of Clovis. Followed by a vast crowd, he bore it in triumph to the great square of Reims, where the magistrates and other public officials had already assembled round the statue of Louis XV. Here he delivered an oration against tyranny and tyrants, and wound up by throwing the sacred vessel at the head of Louis le Bien-aimé with such violence that it broke into a hundred pieces, and the sacred oil trickled once again down the cheeks of the Lord's Anointed.
Events such as these, and language such as the above quoted, show plainly enough how determinedly the Revolution was attacking the principle of authority. It was highly significant that patents of nobility were burned in the same bonfire with the images of the saints, and that disbelief in the sacred ampulla led to the flouting of royalty. From the moment when the authority of religion was overthrown, the magic power of authority in every domain was gone.
It was supplanted by the watchword: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. But this watchword contained at least two fundamental principles instead of one. Liberty as a fundamental principle may be regarded as emanating from Voltaire, fraternity from Rousseau. And equality and liberty did not combine well. When, not long before the Revolution, Saint-Martin, the mystic, proclaimed his mysterious doctrine of the Holy Trinity (Ternaire)—liberty, equality, and fraternity, which always had been, and always should be—he did not foresee the possibility of disunion, of conflict, between these principles. Voltaire says somewhere: "It was a wise provision that made of the Trinity one God; if there had been three they would have come to blows." In 1793 Saint-Martin's trinity revealed the contradictions which lay latent in it.
In the month of April the new Declaration of the Rights of Man which Robespierre had drawn up and persuaded the Jacobins to accept as their programme was published, and in the same month, whilst the violent dispute between Robespierre and Vergniaud was going on, there emanated from the opposite camp the plan of a constitution, evolved by Condorcet, Barrère, Thomas Paine, Pétion, Barbaroux, Sièyes, and others, and drawn up by Condorcet.
If we place these two documents side by side, we have before us in embryo the two ideas which in the future were to struggle for the mastery, namely, the idea of liberalism and the idea of socialism, the former derived from Voltaire, the latter from Rousseau. As the two programmes deal point by point with the same subjects, the difference strikes us here as it does nowhere else.
In the first years of the Revolution there had been no mention of socialism. Men aimed at freeing capital from unjust burdens, not at limiting its power. This is clearly shown by the fact that the first proof which the victorious bourgeoisie gave of their authority after the storming of the Bastille was the publication of a decree that the printers were to be held responsible for every book or pamphlet published by writers without known means of subsistence (sans existence connue). This regulation was published on the 24th of July 1789, exactly ten days after the capture of the Bastille. The bourgeoisie took care, as soon as they had mounted themselves, to draw the ladder up after them. Their first act, when they had won their own place by the aid of the pen, was to take the pen out of the hand of the classes below them.
The Convention, nourished on the ideas of Rousseau and Mably, comprehended that inequality within the citizen society was the worst enemy of political equality, and dreamed of producing equality by giving property to all. Condorcet wished to devote the funds at the disposal of the state, not to the abolishment of private property, but to the equalisation of any excessive disproportion in the distribution of worldly possessions. Right of succession was to be abolished, the means of education were to be made accessible to all, &c., &c. It was not till the owners of property began, after the fall of Robespierre, to resist the claims of those who owned nothing, that the attack on property as such was made. Babeuf's communistic conspiracy followed. The conspiracy was betrayed and defeated, drowned in the blood of the conspirators without a voice being raised in defence of the ideas which had inspired it. Socialism did no more than put out feelers at the time of the Revolution.
Whilst the Girondists' Declaration of the Rights of Man ensures first and foremost the rights of the individual—freedom of conscience and of thought (les franchises de la pensée was the expression in those days), the inviolability of the home, equality in sight of the law, the proportioning of punishment to crime—the Jacobins in every matter insist upon the responsibility of human beings for each other and the duty entailed by brotherhood.
The Girondists laid down the principle of non-interference. The Jacobins taught: The men of all countries are brothers, and the different nations ought to help each other to the best of their ability, like citizens of the same state. The nation which oppresses another nation declares itself the enemy of all. Those who make war upon any one nation in order to arrest the progress of liberty and abolish the rights of humanity ought to be assailed by all the others, not as ordinary enemies, but as insurrectionary murderers and robbers.
The Girondists opposed every tyranny in human shape, but they seldom tried to protect from the tyranny of circumstances. Their work was for the most part of a negative nature. The Jacobins perceived more clearly the uselessness of bestowing on the sick the right to be cured without curing them, the mockery in solemnly conferring on the lame the right to walk. Yet there was no essential difference between them. Condorcet the Girondist felt as strongly as any Jacobin that free competition was a lie when in the race one man was mounted on an excellent horse while the other had to run barefoot.
It was the feeling of duty to society (as defined by Rousseau) which led to Robespierre's significant intervention in the war between the Revolution and positive religion. Once the Revolution had broken into the churches axe in hand, it seemed as if the movement were irresistible. Men mounted on the frailest of scaffolding to scrape from the ceilings of churches portraits of popes concealed by century-old spiders' webs. Images of saints were torn from their niches, and fanaticism destroyed some of the finest works of Gothic art; the emissaries of the Revolution descended even into the vaults, and flashed their lanterns in the pale faces of the dead; fragments of broken-up altars were piled together "like shapeless stones in a quarry." The chairmen of the revolutionary committees wore velvet breeches made out of episcopal robes, and shirts cut out of choristers' surplices. In the end a few atheistic enthusiasts (Anacharsis Clootz, a man of German extraction, Chaumette, and Hébert) made their voices heard, and carried the mob with them in their iconoclastic fury.
Except on this occasion we hear as little of atheism during the Revolution as of socialism. Belief in God and immortality, the common creed of Voltaire and Rousseau, is the creed held unchanged by almost all the chosen leaders of the people. And this same belief pervades all the writings of the period. Thomas Paine's Age of Reason is a good example. Even such a recklessly disreputable poem as Parny's Guerre des Dieux inculcates the same doctrine, Camille Desmoulins writes in a letter: "Mon cher Manuel! Les rois sont mûrs, mais le bon Dieu ne l'est pas encore (notez que je dis le bon Dieu et non pas Dieu, ce qui est fort différent)." This is the standpoint of the age; its task was not to subject