THE GENERATION OF 1789.

 UNDER this title an article appears in the February number of the Revue des Deux Mondes, from the pen of M Guizot. It is a portion of an introductory essay which is soon to appear prefixed to a collection of M. Guizot's speeches, and has been permitted to appear in advance in the pages of the only French periodical in which the old and better days of French thought are still reflected. The theme on which M. Guizot mainly dwells is the confidence he feels in the restoration of public liberty in France. He owns that most of the ancient friends of freedom are weary, disheartened, and despondent, and that its new friends are few in number, and not ostensibly backed by public support. But his own faith in the triumph of political liberty is unshaken, because his faith in France and in French progress and civilisation is unshaken. Political liberty is the natural and necessary sequel, in his eyes, of the whole of French history and we must no more be made hopeless by the revival of the Napoleonic Empire than Englishmen who loved liberty ought to have despaired when the Stuarts seemed to be going to have everything their own way. France is in the main, and at times in her own despite, tending towards political liberty, and therefore her destiny, which is to be free, must be accomplished. We confess that these deductions from the philosophy of history do not give us quite so much comfort as they seem to give M. Guizot. If a man sets out with the theory that political liberty is the destiny of France, it is easy to prove that all things since the age of St. Louis have been moving in that one most desirable direction ; but if he sets out without any theory, he may not see things quite so favourably as M. Guizot sees them. The value of the whole method of looking at the past as a great vestibule through which man has marched to the inner shrine of modern civilisation, has yet to be decided. The speculator who hereafter attempts to determine it will have the advantage of finding this view amply represented and fully explained in the numerous works of M. Guizot. Whatever can be made of the theory has been made of it there, and he will readily acknowledge that, whether wholly, or partially, or in no degree true, it has at least given a charm and weight to the writings of its apostle. M. Guizot's tendency to sum up the results of his reflections on history in the language of a sensible and eloquent philosophy not rarely betrays him into platitudes which he loves because they are his own. But at the same time his anxiety to look at the past and present as a whole, and to seize on the binding tie which links together the centuries of modern Europe, imparts to his writings a character of elevation and largeness which justifies the reputation he has acquired. We are more moved to hope for the restoration of liberty in France by observing that French thought, though stifled, is not extinct, and that the Emperor is continually forced to treat the present system as temporary, than by reading what, in the eyes of a philosophical optimist, are the lessons of French history. But M. Guizot knows Fiance far too well, and has thought over the past history of France far too deeply to permit us to view with indifference any remarks he may have to offer on a subject so full of importance and interest as the " Generation of 1789."

M. Guizot goes unavoidably over old ground in most of what he says, he deplores the separation of the old nobility from the Revolution ; he does justice to the services which Napoleon rendered to the country ; he praises him for having seen that religion must be restored, and that a Court must be formed to satisfy the national taste for elegance and luxury and he repeats what has so often been said, that the Revolution was on the whole a great gain to France, and that those who most decry it would be very sorry to go back to the state of things which preceded it. He gives us something rather more new when he puts in a clear and intelligible form the leading political theories on which, as he says, the Revolution was based. There were, he thinks, three formulas which were running in the heads of men at the time, and by which they were overpowered and guided. The first of these formulas is this :— " No man is bound to obey laws to which he has not consented." The second is, " that power properly resides in the numerical majority." The third is, that "all men are equal." It is very convenient to have the leading ideas of the Revolution put in this concise form, although, as M. Guizot says, the wonder is that any men can ever seriously have entertained them. They are so wholly at variance with the facts of life, that we may be surprised how the facts did not put out the theories at once. But facts do not put out theories for a long time, when the theories are part of a whole mode of regarding life itself. We in England, who live in a country where there are visionaries so wedded to their interpretation of apocalyptic dates as to hold that the millennium has already begun, ought to be prepared for any tenacity of belief in theories that we find on the Continent. And those ideas which were working in the minds of the generation of 1789 were not isolated propositions to which, without preparation, they were invited to assent. They were the results of a whole way of thinking which had been gradually impressed on the mind of France by a series of writers of whom Rousseau was the latest, while at the same time he was the most influential, partly because he was the latest, and still more because he appealed more powerfully than any other to that side of the French intellect which unites sensibility with logic. M. Guizot only makes very slight reference to this; for to have really sketched the generation of 1789 would have required a volume, and not a few pages in a review ; but on the other hand, he calls our attention to two erroneous moral assumptions, which he thinks lay at the bottom of most of the intellectual and social errors of the Revolution. It is this part of his essay that strikes us as both new and valuable. No one acquainted with the French history and the French literature of recent times, can doubt that these moral errors, if we are to call them errors, have largely penetrated the French mind, that they appear at every turn and in every shape, and that no legacy which the generation of 1789 left to its successors has been more fruitful of consequences both for good and evil.

The first of these assumptions in the sphere of morality is that man is naturally good, and that it is society that sets him wrong. This was a doctrine that the men of the Revolution laid to heart. They were fired with a hope and sustained by a conviction that all Frenchmen were like imaginary Roman citizens presented to them in the fictions of popular history— ardent, noble, self-denying, grand ; and that it was only rogues of aristocrats, and priests, and English who made the modern world so much lower and feebler than the ancient. They, too, were Romans, they exclaimed, as they heard of Brutus, and Cincinnatus, and Cicero. They were all that was or ever had been of great and good. Living in a time of excitement, unused to think, and devoid of experience in great changes, they felt as young enthusiasts feel at the end of a novel, whom fancy persuades that they are as lovely and constant as the heroine, and as noble, and graceful, and fortunate as the hero. But the same mode of regarding man and society appears in the newest works of French literature. The whole burthen of Les Misérables is that all men and women, even down to convicts and their companions, are very good and very great, but that society corrupts and crushes them. This, as M. Guizot remarks, presents a rather startling contrast to the teaching of the Bible, that we are all, conceived in sin and have all gone astray. We may be sure that, as there is so startling a contrast, the theory of the men of the Revolution was in some sense wholly wrong. But, in another sense, it may be, in a large degree, true. If we look to the individual man as he appears to himself in the presence of God, there is no truth but the one truth, that he is desperately wicked. This is the sentence which every heart capable of comprehending the idea of holiness passes on itself. To the end of the world, in our age as much as in another, this will remain true. But man has a different feeling when he thinks of himself in relation to other men, and to the place which he occupies on this earth. He then becomes conscious of a nature which is not wholly bad, but is in a great part good—which is capable of ridding itself, in fancy and for a moment, of the presence of evil—and which might issue in far nobler fruits than it does if it were allowed, if men lived together to make each other better, if intellectual light were permitted to beam on their darkness, and if a place for repentance were given to the erring. This seems to us as true as the doctrine of inborn sin does when applied, as the Bible applies it, not to man in society, but to the individual in the presence of his Maker. But Catholicism had attempted to bind society within the rules, and to judge it by the doctrines, which the Bible applies to individuals. And nothing could be more natural, nor, perhaps, at one time more salutary. Modern society derives much of its elevation from the action of Catholicism on the individual. But the time came when the error of judging the world, and its social life and its governments, by the standard of an individual in his devotional moments, grew oppressive. Man required a new fountain of belief in himself, and in the possibility of what he might and could do in this life, in order to dispel the torpidity and despair which had taken possession of society when the doctrine of the worthlessness of man in the sight of God had passed, as in the Europe of the eighteenth century, into the doctrine of the worthlessness of the mass of mankind in comparison with the claims of the few who are born to govern.

The second of these moral errors was that man is all-powerful. It seemed to the generation of 1789, when on the eve of the Revolution, as if everything might be done, and happiness secured, and the beauty of humanity displayed on earth, if only man rose in his power, and hurled into dust his oppressors, and the enemies of his advancement. This feeling, too, is little in harmony with the teaching of the Book which says that man is weak and frail and that he must bear his burthen meekly, and walk humbly and as a pilgrim in the world. But for society, such as society under a monstrous compromise between Catholicism and the State had got to be in France a hundred years ago, the idea of the power of man—the belief that he could make things indefinitely better if he pleased—was an idea involving far more of good than evil. That society can be so remodelled as to make the individual what he ought to be, and that the real remedy for human misery is to reconstitute society, are positions which have been strained far beyond the limits of truth in the writings of such men as Victor Hugo. But it was perfectly true that society had wrapped itself up in a cloak of old, complicated, fine-spun errors, and that a vigorous effort was necessary to tear this cloak away and it was most salutary for France that the men of the Revolution did, in a large measure, tear it away. That an attention to man's happiness and comfort and intellectual advancement in this life is, at this period of the world's history, essential for the promotion of his religious life, has been among the greatest of the truths which a slow and often unwelcome experience has brought home to the minds of the present generation; and it was the men of revolutionary France who, more than any others, first set the idea of this afloat. It is quite true that society is badly constituted, and was far worse constituted seventy or eighty years ago ; and it is also true that the improvement of society is, in many cases, the only door to the improvement of the individual. French writers have pushed these truths beyond the limits of absurdity, and have worked themselves into a belief that Society alone is in fault when the individuals errs ; but in itself, the notion of looking to society principally, and to the circumstances in which he may be placed, as determining whether man generally is to become better or worse in Europe, is one the truth of which is attested not only by reflection on current history, but by the efforts now made on every side to improve the condition of those on whom society presses severely, as the indispensable preliminary to improving the sufferers themselves.

No view of the French Revolution, and of that general revolution throughout the civilised world which appeared most signally in France, appears to us more true than to regard it as a revolt against the double process of applying the truths revealed in the individual sinner and saint to the body of human society, and of at the same time acquiescing in the substitution of military tyranny and oligarchical caste when this application proved practically impossible. It was a great thing that, when this process had been carried on triumphantly for some time, men should at last have dared to say that they felt much better and more noble than they were supposed to be, and that they were determined to give themselves a chance of showing what they could be. No wonder that in spite of all its horrors, in spite of all its mischievous errors about equality and the rights of the majority, and in spite of all the palpable sophistries it had borrowed from Rousseau—the generation of 1789, which dared to say this, is still held in honour by France. We in England have embraced the main truths on which this generation seized, and have embraced them much more gradually, quietly, and sensibly, because our preparation had been long going on, and because Protestantism is so much more elastic than Catholicism in recognising the claims of the world beside those of the Church. It is with the greatest ease that, in England, we make our Protestantism square with the social facts around us, and the social theories that prevail. English Protestantism so readily incorporates secular views of man and his duties below that it incorporates them insensibly. That which, for the sake of our national pride and our peculiar scheme of society, we wish to be true, our religion easily permits us to think true. But Catholicism resisted far more strenuously the inroads of a set of opinions which it thought adverse to Christianity; and this gave rise to a struggle in France which is still going on, and the issue of which still divides the French mind.— Saturday Review.

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW ), Friday 12 June 1863, page 6

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