Page:Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence (1915).djvu/123

Rh of the eighteenth century, and of the Utopians prior to 1848, according to which men will follow the injunctions of the moral law all the better for not having been spoiled by civilisation; in descending from the superior classes to the poorer classes a greater number of good qualities are found; good is only natural to individuals who have remained close to a state of nature.

This theory about the nature of the classes led Drumont to a rather curious historical speculation: none of our revolutions was so bloody as the first, because it was conducted by the middle class—"in proportion as the people became more intimately mixed up with revolutions, they became less ferocious"—"the proletariat, when, for the first time, it had acquired an effective share of authority, was infinitely less sanguinary than the middle class." We cannot remain content with the easy explanations which satisfied Drumont; but it is certain that something has changed since '93. We have to ask ourselves whether the ferocity of the old revolutionaries was not due to reasons depending on the past history of the middle class, so that in confusing the abuses of the revolutionary middle-class force of '93 with the violence of our revolutionary Syndicalists a grave error would be committed: the word revolutionary would, in this case, have two perfectly distinct meanings.

The Third Estate which filled the assemblies in the revolutionary epoch, what may be called the official Third Estate, was not a body of agriculturists and leaders of industry; power was never then in the hands of manufacturers, but in the hands of the lawyers (basochiens). Taine was very much struck by the fact that out of 577 deputies of the Third Estate in the Constituent Assembly,