Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/144

 134 Reviews of Books " the English Revokition remained local, acquires through the communi- " cative genius of France a power of universal expansion. Her writers, " her armies or simply her example was to sow it throughout Europe " from one end to the other. The storm blew a gale, throwing down " thrones and ruining edifices of the past. But. scattering ruins, as it " did. everywhere, the seeds it brought sprang up only in the countries " which were ready to receive them. The French Revolution freed the " nations which were ripe for liberty. It did not free France. Her " Roman training on the contrary tended to the extinction of moral in- " dividuality, which is the elementary substance of every liberty. And " liberty becomes to the French people an intellectual tenet, to be con- " trasted with the ideas of the past, a dogma to be dialectically laid down, " defined, codified and imposed like an ordinance by force, by government. " People ought to be constrained to be free, says Rousseau. Terrorism " will do it. " In order to found liberty, the men in power started by suppressing " it more radically than ever did the most despotic monarchy. But " French liberty was not to take root any more than liberty trees under " the pavement of public streets. It did not grow up from the soil like " a plant, it was driven in it like a stake. It did not respond to a moral "want in men's souls" (p. 8i). The following enumeration of a few chapters will show how ac- curately the author's demonstration is conducted : " The Roman Tradi- tion ", "Calvin's Reformation", "From Renaissance to Revolution: The Encyclopedic ", " From Reformation to Revolution : Rousseau ", " Revo- lutionary Theocracy ", " Caesar back again ", " The Concordat ", " The Counter-Revolution ", " The Revolution of 1848 and the Second Empire ". This is the purely historical part of the book. In a second part, which bears the title : The Moral Causes of the Present Conflicts, the reader will find progressive studies on Auguste Comte and the religion of Science, The Church of Freethinkers, Roman Church and French Society, The Struggle of the Future, etc. The book contains literary portraits of leaders of French thought which are chcfs-d'ccuvrc. It is evidently the subject in which the writer is a master. In the historical part of his work his acknowledged guide was Taine, the Taine of the Origincs dc la France Contcmporaine. The latter's judgments being accepted as bases of the argumentation, some of the results are open to the criticisms which ought to be made against his information. When Taine studied the French Revolution he was under the influence of political events which biassed his mind. As one may see in his letters just published, he was frightened by the Parisian Commune of 1871 and wrote under the obsession of disorder. This made him often unfair to men and times of the great event he had to judge. The riots concealed from him the revolution. I think Professor Scippel has relied too much on his main scurce. The safe habit not to found an opinion on a sir.gle instance has lessened