Several times, in European history, despotism almost equally harsh have born down heavily on human effort; but never have any of them been so thoroughly inept; for none have ever attempted to raise so heavy a mass with so short a lever. And to start with, no matter how authoritative the despot might have been, his intervention was limited.—Philip II. burned heretics, persecuted Moors and drove out Jews; Louis XIV. forcibly converted the Protestants; but both used violence only against dissenters, about a fifteenth or a twentieth of their subjects. If Cromwell, on becoming Protector, remained sectarian, and the compulsory servant of an army of sectarians, he took good care not to impose on other churches the theology, rites and discipline of his own church;2218 on the contrary, he repressed fanatical outrages; protected the Anabaptists as well as his Independents. He granted paid curates to the Presbyterians as well as the public exercise of their worship, he showed the Episcopalians a large tolerance and gave them the right to worship in private; he maintained the two great Anglican universities and allowed the Jews to erect a synagogue.—Frederick II. drafted into his army every able-bodied peasant that he could feed; he kept every man twenty years in the service, under a discipline worse than slavery, with almost certain prospect of death; and in his last war, he sacrificed about one sixth of his male subjects;2219 but they were serfs, and his conscription did not touch the bourgeois class. He put his hands in the pockets of the bourgeois and of every other man, and took every crown they had; when driven to it, he adulterated coin and stopped paying his functionaries; but, under the scrutiny of his eyes, always open, the administration was honest, the police effective, justice exact, toleration unlimited, and the freedom of the press complete; the king allowed the publication of the most cutting pamphlets against himself, and their public sale, even at Berlin.—A little earlier, in the great empire of the east, Peter the Great,2220 with whip in hand, lashed his Muscovite bears and made them drill and dance in European fashion; but were bears accustomed from father to son to the whip and chain; moreover, he stood as the orthodox head of their faith, and left their mir (the village commune) untouched.—Finally, at the other extremity of Europe, and even outside of Europe, in the seventh century the caliph, in the fifteenth century a sultan, a Mahomet or an Omar, a fanatical Arab or brutal Turk, who had just overcome Christians with the sword, himself assigned the limits of his own absolutism: if the vanquished were reduced to the condition of heavily ransomed tributaries and of inferiors daily humiliated, he allowed them their worship, civil laws and domestic usages; he left them their institutions, their convents and their schools; he allowed them to administer the affairs of their own community as they pleased under the jurisdiction of their patriarch, or other natural chieftains.—Thus whatever the tyrant may have been, he did not attempt to entirely recast Man, nor to subject all his subjects to the recasting. However penetrating the tyranny, it stopped in the soul at a certain point; that point reached, the sentiments were left free. No matter how comprehensive this tyranny may have been, it affected only one class of men; the others, outside the net, remained free. When it wounded all at once all sensitive chords, it did so only to a limited minority, unable to defend themselves. As far as the majority, able to protect itself, their main sensibilities were respected, especially the most sensitive, this one or that one, as the case might be, now the conscience which binds man to his religion, now that amour-propre on which honor depends, and now the habits which make man cling to customs, hereditary usages and outward observances. As far as the others were concerned, those which relate to property, personal welfare, and social position, it proceeded cautiously and with moderation. In this way the discretion of the ruler lessened the resistance of the subject, and a daring enterprise, even mischievous, was not outrageous; it might be carried out; nothing was required but a force in hand equal to the resistance it provoked.

Again, and on the other hand, the tyrant possessed this force. Very many and very strong arms stood behind the prince ready to cooperate with him and countervail any resistance.—Behind Philip II. or Louis XIV. ready to drive the dissidents out or at least to consent to their oppression, stood the Catholic majority, as fanatical or as illiberal as their king. Behind Philip II., Louis XIV., Frederick II., and Peter the Great, stood the entire nation, equally violent, rallied around the sovereign through his consecrated title and uncontested right, through tradition and custom, through a rigid sentiment of duty and the vague idea of public security.—Peter the Great counted among his auxiliaries every eminent and cultivated man in the country; Cromwell had his disciplined and twenty-times victorious army; the caliph or sultan brought along with him his military and privileged population.—Aided by cohorts of this stamp, it was easy to raise a heavy mass, and even maintain it in a fixed position. Once the operation was concluded there followed a sort of equilibrium; the mass, kept in the air by a permanent counterbalance, only required a little daily effort to prevent it from falling.

It is just the opposite with the Jacobin enterprise. When it is put into operation, the theory, more exacting, adds an extra weight to the uplifted mass, and, finally, a burden of almost infinite weight.—At first, the Jacobin confined his attacks to royalty, to nobility, to the Church, to parliaments, to privileges, to ecclesiastical and feudal possessions, in short, to medieval foundations. Then he attacks yet more ancient and more solid foundations, positive religion, property and the family.—For four years he has been satisfied with demolition and now he wants to construct. His object is not merely to do away with a positive faith and suppress social inequality, to proscribe revealed dogmas, hereditary beliefs, an established cult, the supremacy of rank and superiority of fortunes, wealth, leisure, refinement and elegance, but he wants, in addition to all this, to re-fashion the citizen. He wants to create new sentiments, impose natural religion on the individual, civic education, uniform ways and habits, Jacobin conduct, Spartan virtue; in short, nothing is to be left in a human being that is not prescribed, enforced and constrained.—Henceforth, there is opposed to the Revolution, not alone the partisans of the ancient rÉgime—priests, nobles, parliamentarians, royalists, and Catholics—but, again, every person imbued with European civilization, every member of a regular family, any possessor of a capital, large or small; every kind or degree of proprietor, farmer, manufacturer, merchant, artisan or farmer, even most of the revolutionaries. Nearly all the revolutionaries count on escaping the constraints they impose, and who only like the strait jacket when it is on another's back.—The influence of resistant wills at this moment becomes incalculable: it would be easier to raise a mountain, and, just at this moment, the Jacobins have deprived themselves of every moral force through which a political engineer acts on human wills.

Unlike Philip II. and Louis XIV. they are not supported by the intolerance of a vast majority, for, instead of fifteen or twenty orthodox against one heretic, they count in their church scarcely more than one orthodox against fifteen or twenty heretics.2221—They are not, like legitimate sovereigns, supported by the stubborn loyalty of an entire population, following in the steps of its chieftain out of the prestige of hereditary right and through habits of ancient fealty. On the contrary, their reign is only a day old and they themselves are interlopers. At first installed by a coup d'État and afterwards by the semblance of an election, they have extorted or obtained by trick the suffrages through which they act. They are so familiar with fraud and violence that, in their own Assembly, the ruling minority has seized and held on to power by violence and fraud, putting down the majority by riots, and the departments by force of arms. To give their brutalities the semblance of right, they improvise two pompous demonstrations, first, the sudden manufacture of a paper constitution, which molders away in their archives, and next, the scandalous farce of a hollow and compulsory plebiscite.—A dozen leaders of the party concentrate unlimited authority in their own hands; but, as admitted by them, their authority is derivative; it is the Convention which makes them its delegates; their precarious title has to be renewed monthly; a turn of the majority may sweep them and their work away to-morrow; an insurrection of the people, whom they have familiarized with insurrection, may to-morrow sweep them away, their work and their majority.—They maintain only a disputed, limited and transient ascendancy over their adherents. They are not military chieftains like Cromwell and Napoleon, generals of an army obeyed without a murmur, but common stump-speakers at the mercy of an audience that sits in judgment on them. There is no discipline in this public; every Jacobin remains independent by virtue of his principles; if he accepts leaders, it is with a reservation of their worth to him; selecting them as he pleases, he is free to change them when he pleases; his trust in them is intermittent, his loyalty provisional, and, as his adhesion depends on a mere preference, he always reserves the right to discard the favorite of to-day as he has discarded the favorite of yesterday. In this audience, there is no such thing as subordination; the lowest demagogue, any noisy subaltern, a HÉbert or Jacques Roux, aspiring to step out of the ranks, overbidding the charlatans in office in order to obtain their places. Even with a complete and lasting ascendancy over an organized band of docile supporters, the Jacobin leaders would be feeble for lack of reliable and competent instruments; for they have but very few partisans other than those of doubtful probity and of notorious incapacity.—Cromwell had around him, to carry out the puritan program, the moral Élite of the nation, an army of rigorists, with narrow consciences, but much more strict towards themselves than towards others, men who never drank and who never swore, who never indulged for a moment in sensuality or idleness, who forbade themselves every act of omission or commission about which they held any scruples, the most honest, the most temperate, the most laborious and the most persevering of mankind,2222 the only ones capable of laying the foundations of that practical morality on which England and the United States still subsist at the present day.—Around Peter the Great, in carrying out his European program, stood the intellectual Élite of the country, an imported staff of men of ability associated with natives of moderate ability, every well-taught resident foreigner and indigenous Russian, the only ones able to organize schools and public institutions, to set up a vast central and regular system of administration, to assign rank according to service and merit, in short, to erect on the snow and mud of a shapeless barbarism a conservatory of civilization which, transplanted like an exotic tree, grows and gradually becomes acclimated.—Around Couthon, Saint-Just, Billaud, Collot, and Robespierre, with the exception of certain men devoted, not to Utopianism but the country, and who, like Carnot, conform to the system in order to save France, there are but a few sectarians to carry out the Jacobin program. These are men so short-sighted as not to clearly comprehend its fallacies, or sufficiently fanatical to accept its horrors, a lot of social outcasts and self-constituted statesmen, infatuated through incommensurate faculties with the parts they play, unsound in mind and superficially educated, wholly incompetent, boundless in ambition, their consciences perverted, callous or deadened by sophistry, hardened through arrogance or killed by crime, by impunity and by success.

Thus, whilst other despots raise a moderate weight, calling around them either the majority or the flower of the nation, employing the best strength of the country and lengthening their lever (of despotism) as much as possible, the Jacobins attempt to raise an incalculable weight, repel the majority as well as the flower of the nation, discard the best strength of the country, and shorten their lever to the utmost. They hold on only to the shorter end, the rough, clumsy, iron-bound, creaking and grinding extremity, that is to say, to physical force,—the means for physical constraint, the heavy hand of the gendarme on the shoulder of the suspect, the jailer's bolts and keys turned on the prisoner, the club used by the sans-culottes on the back of the bourgeois to quicken his pace, and, better still, the Septembriseur's pike thrust into the aristocrat's belly, and the blade falling on the neck held fast in the clutches of the guillotine.—Such, henceforth, is the only machinery they posses for governing the country, for they have deprived themselves of all other. Their engine has to be exhibited, for it works only on condition that its bloody image be stamped indelibly on every body's imagination; if the Negro monarch or the pasha desires to see heads bowing as he passes along, he must be escorted by executioners. They must abuse their engine because fear losing its effect through habit, needs example to keep it alive; the Negro monarch or the pasha who would keep the fear alive by which he rules, must be stimulated every day; he must slaughter too many to be sure of slaughtering enough; he must slaughter constantly, in heaps, indiscriminately, haphazard, no matter for what offense, on the slightest suspicion, the innocent along with the guilty. He and his are lost the moment they cease to obey this rule. Every Jacobin, like every African monarch or pasha, must it that he may be and remain at the head of his band.—That is the reason why the chiefs of the party, its natural and pre-determined leaders, are theoreticians able to grasp its principle and logicians capable of drawing its consequences. They are, however, so inept as to be unable to understand that their enterprise exceeds both their own and all other human resources, but shrewd enough to see that brutal force is their only tool, inhuman enough to apply it unscrupulously and without reserve, and perverted enough to murder at random in order to disseminate terror.

2201 (return)
[ Buchez et Roux, XXXII, 354. (Speech by Robespierre in the Convention, FlorÉal 18, year II.) "Sparta gleams like a flash of lightening amidst profoundest darkness".]

2202 (return)
[ Milos taken by the Athenians; Thebes, after Alexander's victory; Corinth, after its capture by the Romans.—In the Peloponnesian war, the Plateans, who surrender at discretion, are put to death. Nicias is murdered in cold blood after his defeat in Sicily. The prisoners at oegos-Potamos have their thumbs cut off.]

2203 (return)
[ Fustel de Coulanges, "La CitÉ Antique", ch. XVII.]

2204 (return)
[ Plato, "The Apology of Socrates."—See also in the "Crito" Socrates' reasons for not eluding the penalty imposed on him. The antique conception of the State is here clearly set forth.]

2205 (return)
[ Cf. the code of Manu, the Zendavesta, the Pentateuch and the Tcheou-Li. In this last code (Biot's translation), will be found the perfection of the system, particularly in vol. I., 241, 247, II., 393, III., 9, 11, 21, 52. "Every district chief, on the twelfth day of the first moon, assembles together the men of his district and reads to them the table of rules; he examines their virtue, their conduct, their progress in the right path, and in their knowledge, and encourages them; he investigates their errors, their failings and prevents them from doing evil.... Superintendents of marriages see that young people marry at the prescribed age." The reduction of man to a State automaton is plain enough in the institution of "Overseer of Gags..." At all grand hunts, at all gatherings of troops, he orders the application of gags. In these cases gags are put in the soldiers' mouths; they then fulfill their duties without tumult or shouting."]

2206 (return)
[ These two words have no exact equivalents in Greek or Latin, Conscientia, dignitas, honos denote different shade of meaning. This difference is most appreciable in the combination of the two modern terms delicate conscience, scrupulous conscience, and the phrase of stake one's honour on this or that, make it a point of honor, the laws of honor, etc. The technical terms of antique morality: the beautiful, truthfulness, the sovereign good, indicate ideas of another stamp and origin.]

2207 (return)
[ Alas, modern 20th century democratic Man has given up honor and conscience, all he has got to do is to be correct and follow the thousands of rules governing his life. And, of course, make sure that he is following orders or sure of not being caught when he breaks the natural rules of friendship, honor or conscience. Conscience, on the other had, will always lurk somewhere in the shadows of our mind, because we all know how we would like to be treated by others, and will be forced not to transgress certain boundaries in case an intended victim might be in a position to take his revenge. That I am not alone in seeing things this way I noted in an interview with the 79 year old French author Michel DÉon in Le Figaro on the 16th of May 1998 in which Mr. DÉon said: "Everywhere we are still in a nursery. A great movement attempting to turn us all into half-wits (une grande campagne de crÉtinisation est en route). When these are the only ones left, the governments have an easy job. It is very clever." (SR.)]

2208 (return)
[ Montaigne, Essays, book I., ch. 42: "Observe in provinces far from the court, in Brittany for example, the retinue, the subjects, the duties, the ceremony, of a seignior living alone by himself, brought up among his dependents, and likewise observe the flights of his imagination, there is nothing which is more royal; he may allude to his superior once a year, as if he were the King of Persia... The burden of sovereignty scarcely affects the French gentilhomme twice in his life... he who lurks in his own place avoiding dispute and trial is as free as the Duke of Venice."]

2209 (return)
[ "MÉmoires de Chateaubriand," vol. I. ("Les SoirÉes au Chateau de Cambourg".)]

2210 (return)
[ In China, the moral principle is just the opposite. The Chinese, amidst obstacles and embarrassments, always enjoin siao-sin, which means, "abate thy affections." (Huc, "L'Empire Chinoise," I., 204.)]

2211 (return)
[ In the United states the moral order of things reposes chiefly on puritan ideas; nevertheless deep traces of feudal conceptions are found there; for instance, the general deference for women which is quite chivalric there, and even excessive.]

2212 (return)
[ Observe, from this point of view, in the woman of modern times the defenses of female virtue. The (male) sentiment of duty is the first safeguard of modesty, but this has a much more powerful auxiliary in the sentiment of honor, or deep innate pride.]

2213 (return)
[ The moral standard varies, but according to a fixed law, the same as a mathematical function. Each community has its own moral elements, organization, history and surroundings, and necessarily its peculiar conditions of vitality. When the queen been in a hive is chosen and impregnated this condition involves the massacre of useless male and female rivals (Darwin). In China, it consists of paternal authority, literary education and ritual observances. In the antique city, it consisted of the omnipotence of the State, gymnastic education, and slavery. In each century, and in each country, these vital conditions are expressed by more or less hereditary passwords which set forth or interdict this or that class of actions. When the individual feels the inward challenge he is conscious of obligation; the moral conflict consists in the struggle within himself between the universal password and personal desire. In our European society the vital condition, and thus the general countersign, is self-respect coupled with respect for others (including women and children). This countersign, new in history, has a singular advantage over all preceding ones: each individual being respected, each can develop himself according to his nature; he can accordingly invent in every sense, bring forth every sort of production and be useful to himself and others in every way, thus enabling society to develop indefinitely.]

2214 (return)
[ Taine is probably speaking of the colonial wars in China and the conquest of Madagascar. (SR).]

2215 (return)
[ Here Taine is seeing mankind as being male, strong and hardy; however I feel that liberty is more desirable for the strong and confident while the child, the lost, the sick, the ignorant or feeble person is looking for protection, reassurance and guidance. When society consisted of strong independent farmers, hunters, warriors, nomads or artisans backed by family and clan, liberty was an important idea. Today few if any can rise above the horde and gain the insights, the wisdom and the competence which once was such a common thing. Today the strong seek promotion inside the hierarchy of the welfare state rest-house. (S.R.)]

2216 (return)
[ This is just what Lenin could not believe when he read this around 1906. Even Taine did not see how much a French government organization depended upon staff recruited from a hardworking, modest and honest French population. We have now lived to see how the nationalization of private property in Egypt, Argentina, Algeria not to speak of Ethiopia and India proved disastrous and how 40 years of government ownership should degrade and corrupt the populations of Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Albania etc. (SR).]

2217 (return)
[ When the function to be performed is of an uncertain or mixed character the following rule may be applied in deciding whether the State or individuals shall be entrusted with it; also in determining, in the case of cooperation, what portion of it shall be assigned to individuals and what portion to the State. As a general rule, when individuals, either singly or associated together, have a direct interest in, or are drawn toward, a special function, and the community has no direct interest therein, the matter belongs to individuals and not to the State. On the other hand, if the interest of the community in any function is direct, and indirect for individuals singly or associated together, it is proper for the State and not for individuals to take hold of it.—According to this rule the limits of the public and private domain can be defined, which limits, as they change backward and forward, may be verified according to the changes which take place in interests and preferences, direct or indirect.]

2218 (return)
[ Carlyle: "Cromwell's Speeches and Letters," III., 418. (Cromwell's address to the Parliament, September 17, 1656.)]

2219 (return)
[ Seeley, "Life and Times of Stein," II., 143.—Macaulay, "Biographical essays," Frederick the Great. 33, 35, 87, 92.]

2220 (return)
[ Eugene Schuyler, "Peter the Great," vol. 2.]

2221 (return)
[ Cf. "The Revolution" vol. II., pp. 46 and 323, vol. III., ch I. Archives des Affaires EtrangÈrÉs. Vol. 332. (Letter by Thiberge, Marseilles, Brumaire 14, year II.) "I have been to Marteygne, a small town ten leagues from Marseilles, along with my colleague Fournet; I found (je trouvÉe) seventeen patriots in a town of give thousand population."—Ibid., (Letter by Regulus Leclerc, Bergues, Brumaire 15, year II.) At Bergues, he says, "the municipality is composed of traders with empty stores and brewers without beer since the law of the maximum." Consequently there is universal lukewarmness, "only forty persons being found to form a popular club, holding sessions as a favor every five days.... Public spirit at Bergues is dead; fanaticism rules."—Archives Nationales, F7, 7164 (Department of Var, reports of year V. "General idea.")—"At Draguignan, out of seven thousand souls, forty patriots, exclusifs, despised or dishonest; at Vidauban, nine or ten exclusifs, favored by the municipality and who live freely without their means being known; at Brignolles, frequent robberies on the road by robbers said to have been very patriotic in the beginning of the Revolution: people are afraid of them and dare not name them; at FrÉjus, nine leading exclusifs who pass all their time in the cafe."—Berryat-Saint-Prix, "La Justice RÉvolutionnaire," p. 146.—Brutus Thierry, grocer, member of the Rev. Com. Of Angers, said that "in angers, there were not sixty revolutionaries."]

2222 (return)
[ Macaulay. "History of England," I., 152. "The Royalists themselves confessed that, in every department of honest industry, the discarded warriors prospered beyond other men, that none was charged with any theft or robbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if a baker, a mason, or a waggoner attracted notice by his diligence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Oliver's old soldiers."]