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104 search for the most suitable means of setting the country on its feet again. Taine endeavoured to apply the methods of the most scientific psychology to this question, and he looked upon the history of the Revolution as a social experiment. He hoped to be able to make quite clear the danger presented in his opinion by the Jacobin spirit, and thus to induce his contemporaries to change the course of French politics by abandoning ideas which had seemed incorporated in the national tradition, and which were all the more solidly rooted in people's minds because nobody had ever discussed their origin. Taine failed in his enterprise, as Le Play and Renan failed, as all those will fail who try to found an intellectual and moral reform on investigations, on scientific syntheses, and on demonstrations.

It cannot be said, however, that Taine's immense labour was accomplished to no purpose; the history of the Revolution was thoroughly overhauled; the military epic no longer dominates people's judgments about political events. The life of men, the inner workings of factions, the material needs which determine the tendencies of the great masses have now come into the foreground. In the speech which he made on September 24, 1905, at the inauguration of the monument to Taine at Vouziers, the deputy Hubert, while giving all homage to the great and many-sided talent of his illustrious compatriot, expressed a regret that the epic side of the Revolution had been disregarded by him in a systematic manner. These are superfluous regrets; the epic vision can henceforth no longer govern that political history; an idea of the grotesque effects to which this constant desire to return to the old methods may lead can be obtained by reading Jaurès's Histoire socialiste. In vain does Jaurès revive all the most melodramatic images of the old rhetoric; the only effect he manages to produce is one of absurdity.