THE FRENCH NATIONAL FETE.
IT is wise of the French to celebrate the Fall of the Bastille, for precisely the same reason that it is wise of the Eng- lish to celebrate the Queen's Birthday. The celebration brings home to all classes, in a visible and concrete, yet plea- sant way, the regime under which they live, and the essential or central peculiarity of that regime. The Monarchy in Eng- land is perfectly settled, and has no converts to make, nor has any serious party any alternative to propose to the people in exchange for it ; and everybody, therefore, is left to keep or overlook the Queen's Birthday, as he pleases. The King's Day was, however, much more important in the Jacobite time ; and if in our age there were doubts about the stability of the Throne or about the Queen's title, Parliament would have been right in making that day the greatest of statute holidays. In France, where nothing is secure except the social system, the popular recognition of the regime cannot be left entirely to individual will, and as a grand fete suits the national man- ners, a grand fête in honour of the Republic is an excellent method of acknowledging and proclaiming the continued au- thority of the Republican regime; and as a day had to be fixed, we do not know that a better could be found. The capture of the Bastille did not found a Republic in France, or possibly do very much for French freedom; it only proclaimed that the French people were tired of the old regime, and had found out their own strength ; but in such matters more depends on the popular tradition about facts than on the facts themselves, and rightly or wrongly, the French believe the attack on the Bastille to be the turning-point in their history, the birthday of the Revolution.
Whether the child then born was worthy of honour, whether the Revolution has, on the whole, accomplished more good or more evil for France and for mankind, is a question upon which very few thoughtful minds are thoroughly agreed. Judgment upon it depends and must depend too much upon tempera- ment, upon religious feeling, and upon the social ideal of the observer. Patient men, we notice, men who are rather amused and interested by the slow play of Parliamentary forces, who believe in discussion as an interesting as well as advantageous mode of evolving opinion, and who hold that the catastrophic method is safe only in the hands of Omniscience, very rarely like the French Revolution. They accept it and study it, as they might accept and study a flood, and sometimes, after much investigation, pronounce its effects good, but they never give it their cordial admiration. On the other hand, men who are impatient, who long for Deliverers, who think discussion only a tolerable way of elicit- ing truth, and who, if they spoke out, would acknowledge a feeling of irritation against Providence for making oaks grow so slowly, always, even when they are Tories, feel an attraction for the cataclysmal developments of the French Revolution. It is difficult, again, for us at least, to understand, though we admit it sometimes happens, how sincere Catholics can approve a Revolution which in its very principle is fatal to their great preoccupation, the supremacy of the Church in the region of faith and morals. The Divine Right of the priest and of the ruler were attacked together, and only those who thoroughly detest both can heartily love their gigantic and furious assailant. It is difficult to com- prehend, what also happens, how sincere Liberals can fail to appreciate the political victories the Revolution has secured. Nor is it easy even for passionless historians to forget that if to the Revolution we owe all Continental Parliaments and the more equal diffusion of property, we owe to it also universal conscription, heavier taxation, and the nearly total extinction of the ancient, restful, unhurried, contemplative ideal of human life, perhaps the greatest loss European society has sustained.
Nevertheless, there is one ground upon which all reasonable men, or if that is too wide an expression, all reasonable Protestant Liberals, may, we think, unite with the French in honouring the 14th of July, and that is the immensity of the burden from which the Revolution relieved mankind. It did not, as we all know, abolish or limit war ; on the contrary, its first result was Napoleon. It did not abolish or limit " militarism," the idea that soldiering is the noblest and most rightful of careers ; on the contrary, it made it universal. It did not abolish or limit the Pagan as opposed to the Christian spirit in Western Europe ; on the contrary, except in the single groove of sympathy for human suffering, we should say it had developed, as it has certainly released, the Pagan spirit. It did not abolish or limit despotism ; on the contrary, one of its results was to revive Cmsarism, that awful form of tyranny in which the will of the tyrant has behind it the irresistible strength of a multitude, released even from the check of assassination. But it did, for the first time in European history, strike down privilege, did establish the equality of men's right to act,—did, that is, open the path of the world to the peoples, instead of to minute castes. The present generation does not realise how terrible this burden of privilege once was. When the Bastille fell, throughout the Continent, save Switzerland, only kings and nobles and great clerics, and those whom they favoured, were in any complete sense alive at all. The body of each people were not deprived of rights, so much as devoid of them. They might be, and in some places, such as the Tyrol, they were, most kindly treated ; but their only right was the horses' right—the right of kicking, or neighing, or of showing vice so incurable that no task could be imposed—and even this was not always allowed. They had not a clear right of petition, for if the King chose he could treat petitioning as rebellion, and he often did choose, hanging in France, for example, forty persons at once for setting forth their grievance, which happened to be hunger. The masses of the people had no rightful control over their Governments at all. They had no right to refuse any taxes demanded. They could not, save by royal favour, rise in their own armies and fleets. They could not, save by entering the circle of the privi- leged Corporations, engage in any commerce, or practise any trade, or enter on any pursuit, even agriculture, except in the strictest subordination to men who were their superiors only because they were privileged. Every road of life, every path to comfort, often even the way to the Courts of Justice, was barred by privilege, by the right of castes, often not noble by birth, to the monopoly of all methods of action. Men could not write, could not speak, could not combine, unless they were privileged to do so, were, in fact, bound from birth to death in chains as rigid as those which are supposed to bind, but do not always bind, the lower castes of India. In no country of Europe could a born General like Moreau become a General, any more than a Sudra could become a Brahmin ; and the military monopoly was only the most marked. The community was deprived of nine-tenths of its potential capacities, was compelled to seek all leaders, all officers, all captains of labour among a tenth or twentieth of its own members, who were invested, they hardly knew how, by birth, or the favour of the great, or purchase, or connection with ancient corporations, with a monopoly in every direction of the first of human rights, the right of action. The peoples were like grown men swaddled in long- clothes, imprisoned in cradles, sentenced never to go fcrth of nurseries or escape the authority of bowies. The object of the system was not tyranny, though when civilisation had made money valuable, privilege became an instrument of extortion and an intolerable oppression, but was rather drill,—to keep society in the only kind of order pleasant to those who had acquired the privilege of arranging it. Its effect for ages was numbness rather than pain, pain only beginning when the bound man felt and struggled against his withes. But the system was fatal to progress, fatal to intellectual advance, fatal in a degree that still remains hardly intelligible to that accumulation of material resources which is the essential base of modern civilisation. It is a humiliating confession, but after years of study, we still cannot trace the true reason why Louis XVI.'s Government in its later years could raise no money. The people of Germany, as industrious as the English, never had enough to eat. The French owned, speaking roughly, the country they own now ; they were nearly as numerous ; they probably worked harder; they were certainly more obedient ; yet it is as certain as any statistical fact in this world can be, that they did not produce one-fifth of their present annual production. What was produced was absorbed by the privileged, until it is broadly true to say that in the latter years of Louis XIV., France, Germany, Italy, and Spain existed for the sake of less than a million persons, who alone were in any sense free, or progressive, or contented, or, as we have said, alive. It was this awful waste of the resources of mankind, material and in- tellectual, or derivable from that most necessary of all free- doms, the power of combination, this enforced torpor of all but the few, this suppression of all free discussion and all free propa- gation of thought, to which the Revolution put a final end, and for which Englishmen may without hesitation honour its commencing day. Much remains to be accomplished, but this at least has been achieved. Throughout Western Europe all careers are open to all. The race, and not the caste, is free to act. The reservoir of power, and, therefore, of possibilities, has been enlarged tenfold, and all men have their field. The multitude has achieved not only the power of governing, about which thinkers still dispute, but the power of working, about which dispute, at least among the sane, has at last ended. Of all the men who rule Western Europe now, who produce its literature, who direct its commerce, who possess its wealth, and who advance its science, not one in ten would, but for the French Revolution, have possessed full civil rights, the liberty to develope his capacities. The Revolution rolled the stone from the sepulchre of the living.
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