CHAPTER XXVIITHE INTOLERANCE OF REVOLUTION
The ancient edifice of official glory and unofficial misery known as the Kingdom of France came crashing down on a memorable evening in the month of August of the year of grace 1789.
On that hot and sultry night, after a week of increasing emotional fury, the National Assembly worked itself into a veritable orgy of brotherly love. Until in a moment of intense excitement the privileged classes surrendered all those ancient rights and prerogatives which it had taken them three centuries to acquire and as plain citizens declared themselves in favor of those theoretical rights of man which henceforth would be the foundation-stone for all further attempts at popular self-government.
As far as France was concerned, this meant the end of the feudal system. An aristocracy which is actually composed of the “aristoi,” of the best of the most enterprising elements of society, which boldly assumes leadership and shapes the destinies of the common country, has a chance to survive. A nobility which voluntarily retires from active service and contents itself with ornamental clerical jobs in diverse departments of government is only fit to drink tea on Fifth Avenue or run restaurants on Second.
The old France therefore was dead.
Whether for better or for worse, I do not know.
But it was dead and with it there passed away that mostoutrageous form of an invisible government which the Church, ever since the days of Richelieu, had been able to impose upon the anointed descendants of Saint Louis.
Verily, now as never before, mankind was given a chance.
Of the enthusiasm which at that period filled the hearts and souls of all honest men and women, it is needless to speak.
The millennium was close at hand, yea, it had come.
And intolerance among the many other vices inherent in an autocratic form of government was for good and all to be eradicated from this fair earth.
Allons, enfants de la patrie, the days of tyranny are gone!
And more words to that effect.
Then the curtain went down, society was purged of its many iniquities, the cards were re-shuffled for a new deal and when it was all over, behold our old friend Intolerance, wearing a pair of proletarian pantaloons and his hair brushed à la Robespierre, a-sitting side by side with the public prosecutor and having the time of his wicked old life.
Ten years ago he had sent people to the scaffold for claiming that authority maintaining itself solely by the grace of Heaven might sometimes be in error.
Now he hustled them to their doom for insisting that the will of the people need not always and invariably be the will of God.
A ghastly joke!
But a joke paid for (after the nature of such popular fancies) with the blood of a million innocent bystanders.
What I am about to say is unfortunately not very original. One can find the same idea couched in different if more elegant words in the works of many of the ancients.
In matters pertaining to man’s inner life there are, andapparently there always have been, and most likely there always will be two entirely different varieties of human beings.
A few, by dint of endless study and contemplation and the serious searching of their immortal souls will be able to arrive at certain temperate philosophical conclusions which will place them above and beyond the common worries of mankind.
But the vast majority of the people are not contented with a mild diet of spiritual “light wines.” They want something with a kick to it, something that burns on the tongue, that hurts the gullet, that will make them sit up and take notice. What that “something” is does not matter very much, provided it comes up to the above-mentioned specifications and is served in a direct and simple fashion and in unlimited quantities.
This fact seems to have been little understood by historians and this has led to many and serious disappointments. No sooner has an outraged populace torn down the stronghold of the past (a fact duly and enthusiastically reported by the local Herodoti and Taciti), than it turns mason, carts the ruins of the former citadel to another part of the city and there remolds them into a new dungeon, every whit as vile and tyrannical as the old one and used for the same purpose of repression and terror.
The very moment a number of proud nations have at last succeeded in throwing off the yoke imposed upon them by an “infallible man” they accept the dictates of an “infallible book.”
Yea, on the very day when Authority, disguised as a flunkey, is madly galloping to the frontier, Liberty enters the deserted palace, puts on the discarded royal raiment and forthwith commits herself to those selfsame blundersand cruelties which have just driven her predecessor into exile.
It is all very disheartening, but it is an honest part of our story and must be told.
No doubt the intentions of those who were directly responsible for the great French upheaval were of the best. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had laid down the principle that no citizen should ever be disturbed in the peaceful pursuit of his ways on account of his opinion, “not even his religious opinion,” provided that his ideas did not disturb the public order as laid down by the various decrees and laws.
This however did not mean equal rights for all religious denominations. The Protestant faith henceforth was to be tolerated, Protestants were not to be annoyed because they worshiped in a different church from their Catholic neighbors, but Catholicism remained the official, the “dominant” Church of the state.
Mirabeau, with his unerring instinct for the essentials of political life, knew that this far famed concession was only a half-way measure. But Mirabeau, who was trying to turn a great social cataclysm into a one-man revolution, died under the effort and many noblemen and bishops, repenting of their generous gesture of the night of the fourth of August, were already beginning that policy of obstructionism which was to be of such fatal consequence to their master the king. And it was not until two years later in the year 1791 (and exactly two years too late for any practical purpose) that all religious sects including the Protestants and the Jews, were placed upon a basis of absolute equality and were declared to enjoy the same liberty before the law.
From that moment on, the rôles began to be reversed. The constitution which the representatives of the Frenchpeople finally bestowed upon an expectant country insisted that all priests of whatsoever faith should swear an oath of allegiance to the new form of government and should regard themselves strictly as servants of the state, like the school-teachers and postal employees and light-house keepers and customs officials who were their fellow-citizens.
Pope Pius VI objected. The clerical stipulations of the new constitution were in direct violation of every solemn agreement that had been concluded between France and the Holy See since the year 1516. But the Assembly was in no mood to bother about such little trifles as precedents and treaties. The clergy must either swear allegiance to this decree or resign their positions and starve to death. A few bishops and a few priests accepted what seemed inevitable. They crossed their fingers and went through the formality of an oath. But by far the greater number, being honest men, refused to perjure themselves and taking a leaf out of the book of those Huguenots whom they had persecuted during so many years, they began to say mass in deserted stables and to give communion in pigsties, to preach their sermons behind country hedges and to pay clandestine visits to the homes of their former parishioners in the middle of the night.
Generally speaking, they fared infinitely better than the Protestants had done under similar circumstances, for France was too hopelessly disorganized to take more than very perfunctory measures against the enemies of her constitution. And as none of them seemed to run the risk of the galleys, the excellent clerics were soon emboldened to ask that they, the non-jurors, the “refractory ones” as they were popularly called, be officially recognized as one of the “tolerated sects” and be accorded those privileges which duringthe previous three centuries they had so persistently refused to grant to their compatriots of the Calvinist faith.
The situation, for those of us who look back at it from the safe distance of the year 1925, was not without a certain grim humor. But no definite decision was taken, for the Assembly soon afterwards fell entirely under the denomination of the extreme radicals and the treachery of the court, combined with the stupidity of His Majesty’s foreign allies, caused a panic which in less than a week spread from the coast of Belgium to the shores of the Mediterranean and which was responsible for that series of wholesale assassinations which raged from the second to the seventh of September of the year 1792.
From that moment on the Revolution was bound to degenerate into a reign of terror.
The gradual and evolutionary efforts of the philosophers came to naught when a starving populace began to suspect that their own leaders were engaged in a gigantic plot to sell the country to the enemy. The explosion which then followed is common history. That the conduct of affairs in a crisis of such magnitude is likely to fall into the hands of unscrupulous and ruthless leaders is a fact with which every honest student of history is sufficiently familiar. But that the principal actor in the drama should have been a prig, a model-citizen, a hundred-percenting paragon of Virtue, that indeed was something which no one had been able to foresee.
When France began to understand the true nature of her new master, it was too late, as those who tried in vain to utter their belated words of warning from the top of a scaffold in the Place de la Concorde could have testified.
Thus far we have studied all revolutions from the point of view of politics and economics and social organization.But not until the historian shall turn psychologist or the psychologist shall turn historian shall we really be able to explain and understand those dark forces that shape the destinies of nations in their hour of agony and travail.
There are those who hold that the world is ruled by sweetness and light. There are those who maintain that the human race respects only one thing, brute force. Some hundred years from now, I may be able to make a choice. This much, however, seems certain to us, that the greatest of all experiments in our sociological laboratory, the French revolution, was a noisy apotheosis of violence.
Those who had tried to prepare for a more humane world by way of reason were either dead or were put to death by the very people whom they had helped to glory. And with the Voltaires and Diderots and the Turgots and the Condorcets out of the way, the untutored apostles of the New Perfection were left the undisputed masters of their country’s fate. What a ghastly mess they made of their high mission!
During the first period of their rule, victory lay with the out-and-out enemies of religion, those who had some particular reason to detest the very symbols of Christianity; those who in some silent and hidden way had suffered so deeply in the old days of clerical supremacy that the mere sight of a cassock drove them into a frenzy of hate and that the smell of incense made them turn pale with long forgotten rage. Together with a few others who believed that they could disprove the existence of a personal God with the help of mathematics and chemistry, they set about to destroy the Church and all her works. A hopeless and at best an ungrateful task but it is one of the characteristics of revolutionary psychology that the normal becomes abnormal and the impossible is turned into an every day occurrence.Hence a paper decree of the Convention abolishing the old Christian calendar; abolishing all saints’ days; abolishing Christmas and Easter; abolishing weeks and months and re-dividing the year into periods of ten days each with a new pagan Sabbath on every tenth. Hence another paper pronunciamento which abolished the worship of God and left the universe without a master.
But not for long.
However eloquently explained and defended within the bare rooms of the Jacobin club, the idea of a limitless and empty void was too repellent to most citizens to be tolerated for more than a couple of weeks. The old Deity no longer satisfied the masses. Why not follow the example of Moses and Mahomet and invent a new one that should suit the demands of the times?
As a result, behold the Goddess of Reason!
Her exact status was to be defined later. In the meantime a comely actress, properly garbed in ancient Greek draperies, would fill the bill perfectly. The lady was found among the dancers of his late Majesty’s corps de ballet and at the proper hour was most solemnly conducted to the high altar of Notre Dame, long since deserted by the loyal followers of an older faith.
As for the blessed Virgin who, during so many centuries, had stood a tender watch over all those who had bared the wounds of their soul before the patient eyes of perfect understanding, she too was gone, hastily hidden by loving hands before she be sent to the limekilns and be turned into mortar. Her place had been taken by a statue of Liberty, the proud product of an amateur sculptor and done rather carelessly in white plaster. But that was not all. Notre Dame had seen other innovations. In the middle of thechoir, four columns and a roof indicated a “Temple of Philosophy” which upon state occasions was to serve as a throne for the new dancing divinity. When the poor girl was not holding court and receiving the worship of her trusted followers, the Temple of Philosophy harbored a “Torch of Truth” which to the end of all time was to carry high the burning flame of world enlightenment.
The “end of time” came before another six months.
On the morning of the seventh of May of the year 1794 the French people were officially informed that God had been reëstablished and that the immortality of the soul was once more a recognized article of faith. On the eighth of June, the new Supreme Being (hastily constructed out of the second-hand material left behind by the late Jean Jacques Rousseau) was officially presented to his eager disciples.
Robespierre in a new blue waistcoat delivered the address of welcome. He had reached the highest point of his career. The obscure law clerk from a third rate country town had become the high priest of the Revolution. More than that, a poor demented nun by the name of Catherine Théot, revered by thousands as the true mother of God, had just proclaimed the forthcoming return of the Messiah and she had even revealed his name. It was Maximilian Robespierre; the same Maximilian who in a fantastic uniform of his own designing was proudly dispensing reams of oratory in which he assured God that from now on all would be well with His little world.
And to make doubly sure, two days later he passed a law by which those suspected of treason and heresy (for once more they were held to be the same, as in the good old days of the Inquisition) were deprived of all means of defense, a measure so ably conceived that during the next six weeksmore than fourteen hundred people lost their heads beneath the slanting knife of the guillotine.
The rest of his story is only too well known.
As Robespierre was the perfect incarnation of all he himself held to be Good (with a capital G) he could, in his quality of a logical fanatic, not possibly recognize the right of other men, less perfect, to exist on the same planet with himself. As time went by, his hatred of Evil (with a capital E) took on such proportions that France was brought to the brink of depopulation.
Then at last, and driven by fear of their own lives, the enemies of Virtue struck back and in a short but desperate struggle destroyed this Terrible Apostle of Rectitude.
Soon afterwards the force of the Revolution had spent itself. The constitution which the French people then adopted recognized the existence of different denominations and gave them the same rights and privileges. Officially at least the Republic washed her hands of all religion. Those who wished to form a church, a congregation, an association, were free to do so but they were obliged to support their own ministers and priests and recognize the superior rights of the state and the complete freedom of choice of the individual.
Ever since, the Catholics and Protestants in France have lived peacefully side by side.
It is true that the Church never recognized her defeat, continues to deny the principle of a division of state and church (see the decree of Pope Pius IX of December 8th, 1864) and has repeatedly tried to come back to power by supporting those political parties who hope to upset the republican form of government and bring back the monarchy or the empire. But these battles are usually fought in the private parlors of some minister’s wife, or in the rabbit-shooting-lodgeof a retired general with an ambitious mother-in-law.
They have thus far provided the funny papers with some excellent material but they are proving themselves increasingly futile.