The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1

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II. NAIVE CONVICTIONS

The first result. - The theory easily applied. - Confidence in it
due to belief in man's inherent goodness and reasonableness.

Hence, two consequences.-In the first place, a society thus
organized is the only just one; for, the reverse of all others, it is
not the result of a blind subjection to traditions, but of a contract
concluded among equals, examined in open daylight, and assented to in
full freedom.[5] The social contract, composed of demonstrated
theorems, has the authority of geometry; hence an equal value at all
times, in every place, and for every people; it is accordingly
rightfully established. Those who put an obstacle in its way are
enemies of the human race; whether a government, an aristocracy or a
clergy, they must be overthrown. Revolt is simply just defense; in
withdrawing ourselves from their hands we only recover what is
wrongfully held and which legitimately belongs to us. - In the second
place, this social code, as just set forth, once promulgated, is
applicable without misconception or resistance; for it is a species of
moral geometry, simpler than any other, reduced to first principles,
founded on the clearest and most popular notions, and, in four steps,
leading to capital truths. The comprehension and application of these
truths demand no preparatory study or profound reflection; Reason is
enough, and even common sense. Prejudice and selfishness alone might
impair the testimony; but never will testimony be wanting in a sound
brain and in an upright heart. Explain the rights of man to a laborer
or to a peasant and at once he becomes an able politician; teach
children the citizen's catechism and, on leaving school, they
comprehend duties and rights as well as the four fundamental
principles. - Thereupon hope spreads her wings to the fullest extent,
all obstacles seem removed. It is admitted that, of itself, and
through its own force, the theory engenders its own application, and
that it suffices for men to decree or accept the social compact to
acquire suddenly by this act the capacity for comprehending it and the
disposition to carry it out.

What a wonderful confidence, at first inexplicable, which assume
with regard to man an idea which we no longer hold. Man, indeed, was
regarded as essentially good and reasonable. - Rational, that is to
say, capable of assenting to a plain obvious principle, of following
an ulterior chain of argument, of understanding and accepting the
final conclusion, of extracting for himself, on the occasion calling
for it, the varied consequences to which it leads: such is the
ordinary man in the eyes of the writers of the day; they judged him by
themselves. To them the human intellect is their own, the classic
intellect. For a hundred and fifty years it ruled in literature, in
philosophy, in science, in education, in conversation, by virtue of
tradition, of usage and of good taste. No other was tolerated and no
other was imagined; and if, within this closed circle, a stranger
succeeds in introducing himself, it is on condition of adopting the
oratorical idiom which the raison raisonnante imposes on all its
guests, on Greeks, Englishmen, barbarians, peasants and savages,
however different from each other and however different they may be
amongst themselves. In Buffon, the first man, on narrating the first
hours of his being, analyses his sensations, emotions and impulses,
with as much subtlety as Condillac himself. With Diderot, Otou the
Tahitian, with Bernardin de St. Pierre, a semi-savage Hindu and an old
colonist of the Ile-de-France, with Rousseau a country vicar, a
gardener and a juggler, are all accomplished conversationalists and
moralists. In Marmontel and in Florian, in all the literature of
inferior rank preceding or accompanying the Revolution, also in the
tragic or comic drama, the chief talent of the personage, whoever he
may be, whether an uncultivated rustic, tattooed barbarian or naked
savage, consists in being able to explain himself, in arguing and in
following an abstract discourse with intelligence and attention, in
tracing for himself, or in the footsteps of a guide, the rectilinear
pathway of general ideas. Thus, to the spectators of the eighteenth
century, Reason is everywhere and she stands alone in the world. A
form of intellect so universal necessarily strikes them as natural,
they resemble people who, speaking but one language, and one they have
always spoken with facility, cannot imagine another language being
spoken, or that they may be surrounded by the deaf and the dumb. And
so much the more in as much as their theory authorizes this prejudice.
According to the new ideology all minds are within reach of all
truths. If the mind does not grasp them the fault is ours in not being
properly prepared; it will comprehend if we take the trouble to guide
it properly. For it has senses the same as our own; and sensations,
revived, combined and noted by signs, suffice to form "not only all
our conceptions but again all our faculties."[6] An exact and constant
relationship of ideas attaches our simplest perceptions to the most
complex sciences, and, from the lowest to the highest degree, a scale
is practicable; if the scholar stops on the way it is owing to our
having left too great an interval between two degrees of the scale;
let no intermediary degrees be omitted and he will mount to the top of
it. To this exalted idea of the faculties of man is added a no less
exalted idea of his heart. Rousseau having declared this to be
naturally good, the refined class plunge into the belief with all the
exaggerations of fashion and all the sentimentality of the drawing-
room. The conviction is widespread that man, and especially the man of
the people, is sensitive and affectionate by nature; that he is
immediately impressed by benefactions and disposed to be grateful for
them, that he softens at the slightest sign of interest in him, and
that he is capable of every refinement. A series of engravings
represents two children in a dilapidated cottage,[7] one five and the
other three years old, by the side of an infirm grandmother, one
supporting her head and the other giving her drink; the father and
mother enter and, on seeing this touching incident, "these good people
find themselves so happy in possessing such children they forget they
are poor." "Oh, my father," cries a shepherd youth of the Pyrénées,[8]
"accept this faithful dog, so true to me for seven years; in future
let him follow and defend you, thus serving me better than in any
other manner." It would require too much space to follow in the
literature of the end of the century, from Marmontel to Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, and from Florian to Berquin and Bitaubé, the
interminable repetition of these sweet insipidities. The illusion even
reaches statesmen. "Sire," says Turgot, on presenting the king with a
plan of political education,[9] "I venture to assert that in ten years
your nation will no longer be recognizable, and through enlightenment
and good morals, in intelligent zeal for your service and for the
country, it will rise above all other nations. Children who are now
ten years of age will then be men prepared for the state, loving their
country, submissive to authority, not through fear but through Reason,
aiding their fellow-citizens, and accustomed to recognizing and
respecting justice." - In the months of January, 1789,[10] Necker, to
whom M. de Bouillé pointed out the imminent danger arising from the
unswerving efforts of the Third-Estate , "coldly replied, turning his
eyes upward, 'reliance must be placed on the moral virtues of man.' "
- In the main, on the imagination forming any conception of human
society, this consists of a vague, semi-bucolic, semi-theatrical
scene, somewhat resembling those displayed on the frontispieces of
illustrated works on morals and politics. Half-naked men with others
clothed in skins, assemble together under a large oak tree; in the
center of the group a venerable old man arises and makes an address,
using "the language of nature and Reason," proposing that all should
be united, and explaining how men are bound together by mutual
obligations; he shows them the harmony of private and of public
interests, and ends by making them appreciate of the beauty of
virtue.[11] All utter shouts of joy, embrace each other, gather round
the speaker and elect him chief magistrate; dancing is going on under
the branches in the background, and henceforth happiness on earth is
fully established. - This is no exaggeration. The National Assembly
addresses the nation in harangues of this style. For many years the
government speaks to the people as it would to one of Gessner's
shepherds. The peasants are entreated not to burn castles because it
is painful for their good king to see such sights. They are exhorted
"to surprise him with their virtues in order that he may be the sooner
rewarded for his own."[12] At the height of the Jacquerie tumults the
sages of the day seem to think they are living in a state of pastoral
simplicity, and that with an air on the flute they may restore to its
fold the howling pack of bestial animosities and unchained appetites

III. OUR TRUE HUMAN NATURE.

The inadequacy and fragility of reason in man. - The rarity and
inadequacy of reason in humanity. - Subordination of reason in human
conduct. - Brutal and dangerous forces. - The nature and utility of
government. Government impossible under the new theory.

It is a sad thing to fall asleep in a sheep-shed and, on
awakening, to find the sheep transformed into wolves; and yet, in the
event of a revolution that is what we may expect. What we call reason
in Man is not an innate endowment, basic and enduring, but a tardy
acquisition and a fragile composition. The slightest physiological
knowledge will tell us that it is a precarious act of balance,
dependent on the no less greater instability of the brain, nerves,
circulation and digestion. Take women that are hungry and men that
have been drinking; place a thousand of these together, and let them
excite each other with their cries, their anxieties, and the
contagious reaction of their ever-deepening emotions; it will not be
long before you find them a crowd of dangerous maniacs. This becomes
evident, and abundantly so, after 1789. - Now, consult psychology.
The simplest mental operation, a sensuous perception, is an act of
memory, the appliance of a name, an ordinary act of judgment is the
play of complicated mechanism, the joint and final result of several
millions of wheels which, like those of a clock,[13] turn and propel
blindly, each for itself, each through its own force, and each kept in
place and in functional activity by a system of balance and
compensation.[14] If the hands mark the hour with any degree of
accuracy it is due to a wonderful if not miraculous conjunction, while
hallucination, delirium and monomania, ever at the door, are always
ready to enter it. Properly speaking Man is mad, as the body is sick,
by nature; the health of our mind, like the health of our organs, is
simply a repeated achievement and a happy accident. If such happens to
be the case with the coarse woof and canvas, with the large and
approximately strong threads of our intellect, what are the chances
for the ulterior and superadded embroidery, the subtle and complicated
netting forming reason properly so called, and which is composed of
general ideas? Formed by a slow and delicate process of weaving,
through a long system of signs, amidst the agitation of pride, of
enthusiasm and of dogmatic obstinacy, what risk, even in the most
perfect brain, for these ideas only inadequately to correspond with
outward reality! All that we require in this connection is to witness
the operation of the idyll in vogue with the philosophers and
politicians. - These being the superior minds, what can be said of
the masses of the people, of the uncultivated or semi-cultivated
brains? According as reason is crippled in man so is it rare in
humanity. General ideas and accurate reasoning are found only in a
select few. The comprehension of abstract terms and the habit of
making accurate deductions requires previous and special preparation,
a prolonged mental exercise and steady practice, and besides this,
where political matters are concerned, a degree of composure which,
affording every facility for reflection, enables a man to detach
himself for a moment from himself for the consideration of his
interests as a disinterested observer. If one of these conditions is
wanting, reason, especially in relation to politics, is absent. - In
a peasant or a villager, in any man brought up from infancy to manual
labor, not only is the network of superior conceptions defective, but
again the internal machinery by which they are woven is not perfected.
Accustomed to the open air, to the exercise of his limbs, his
attention flags if he stands inactive for a quarter of an hour;
generalized expressions find their way into his mind only as sound;
the mental combination they ought to excite cannot be produced. He
becomes drowsy unless a powerful vibrating voice contagiously arouses
in him the instincts of flesh and blood, the personal cravings, the
secret enmities which, restrained by outward discipline, are always
ready to be set free. - In the half-cultivated mind, even with the
man who thinks himself cultivated and who reads the newspapers,
principles are generally disproportionate guests; they are above his
comprehension; he does not measure their bearings, he does not
appreciate their limitations, he is insensible to their restrictions
and he falsifies their application. They are like those preparations
of the laboratory which, harmless in the chemist's hands, become
destructive in the street under the feet of passing people. - Too soon
will this be apparent when, in the name of popular sovereignty, each
commune, each mob, shall regard itself as the nation and act
accordingly; when Reason, in the hands of its new interpreters, shall
inaugurate riots in the streets and peasant insurrections in the
fields.[15]

This is owing to the philosophers of the age having been mistaken
in two ways. Not only is reason not natural to Man nor universal in
humanity, but again, in the conduct of Man and of humanity, its
influence is small. Except with a few cool and clear intellects, a
Fontenelle, a Hume, a Gibbon, with whom it may prevail because it
encounters no rivals, it is very far from playing a leading part; it
belongs to other forces born within us, and which, by virtue of being
the first comers, remain in possession of the field. The place
obtained by reason is always restricted; the office it fulfills is
generally secondary. Openly or secretly, it is only a convenient
subaltern, a domestic advocate constantly suborned, employed by the
proprietors to plead in their behalf; if they yield precedence in
public it is only through decorum. Vainly do they proclaim it the
recognized sovereign; they grant it only a passing authority, and,
under its nominal control, they remain the inward masters. These
masters of Man consists of physical temperament, bodily needs, animal
instinct, hereditary prejudice, imagination, generally the dominant
passion, and more particularly personal or family interest, also that
of caste or party. We are making a big mistake were we assume men to
be naturally good, generous, pleasant, or at any rate gentle, pliable,
and ready to sacrifice themselves to social interests or to those of
others. There are several, and among them the strongest, who, left to
themselves, would only wreak havoc. - In the first place, if there is
no certainty of Man being a remote blood cousin of the monkey, it is
at least certain that, in his structure, he is an animal closely
related to the monkey, provided with canine teeth, carnivorous,
formerly cannibal and, therefore, a hunter and bellicose. Hence there
is in him a steady substratum of brutality and ferocity, and of
violent and destructive instincts, to which must be added, if he is
French, gaiety, laughter, and a strange propensity to gambol and act
insanely in the havoc he makes; we shall see him at work. - In the
second place, at the outset, his condition casts him naked and
destitute on an ungrateful soil, on which subsistence is difficult,
where, at the risk of death, he is obliged to save and to economize.
Hence a constant preoccupation and the rooted idea of acquiring,
accumulating, and possessing, rapacity and avarice, more particularly
in the class which, tied to the globe, fasts for sixty generations in
order to support other classes, and whose crooked fingers are always
outstretched to clutch the soil whose fruits they cause to grow;-we
shall see this class at work. - Finally, his more delicate mental
organization makes of him from the earliest days an imaginative being
in which swarming fancies develop themselves into monstrous chimeras
to expand his hopes, fears and desires beyond all bounds. Hence an
excess of sensibility, sudden outbursts of emotion, contagious
agitation, irresistible currents of passion, epidemics of credulity
and suspicion, in short, enthusiasm and panic, especially if he is
French, that is to say, excitable and communicative, easily thrown off
his balance and prompt to accept foreign impulsion, deprived of the
natural ballast which a phlegmatic temperament and concentration of
lonely meditations secure to his German and Latin neighbors; and all
this we shall see at work. - These constitute some of the brute
forces that control human life. In ordinary times we pay no attention
to them; being subordinated they do not seem to us formidable. We take
it for granted that they are allayed and pacified ; we flatter
ourselves that the discipline imposed on them has made them natural,
and that by dint of flowing between dikes they are settled down into
their accustomed beds. The truth is that, like all brute forces, like
a stream or a torrent, they only remain in these under constraint; it
is the dike which, through its resistance, produces this moderation.
Another force equal to their force had to be installed against their
outbreaks and devastation, graduated according to their scale, all the
firmer as they are more menacing, despotic if need be against their
despotism, in any event constraining and repressive, at the outset a
tribal chief, later an army general, all modes consisting in an
elective or hereditary man-at-arms, possessing vigilant eyes and
vigorous arms, and who, with blows, excites fear and, through fear,
maintains order. In the regulation and limitation of his blows divers
instrumentalities are employed, a pre-established constitution, a
division of powers, a code of laws, tribunals, and legal formalities.
At the bottom of all these wheels ever appears the principal lever,
the efficacious instrument, namely, the policeman armed against the
savage, brigand and madman each of us harbors, in repose or manacled,
but always living, in the recesses of his own breast.[16]

On the contrary, in the new theory, every principle promulgated,
every precaution taken, every suspicion awaked is aimed against the
policeman. In the name of the sovereignty of the people all authority
is withdrawn from the government, every prerogative, every initiative,
its continuance and its force. The people, being sovereign the
government is simply its clerk, and less than its clerk, merely its
domestic. - Between them "no contract" indefinite or at least
enduring, "and which may be canceled only by mutual consent or the
unfaithfulness of one of the two parties. It is against the nature of
a political body for the sovereign to impose a law on himself which he
cannot set aside." - There is no sacred and inviolable charter
"binding a people to the forms of an established constitution. The
right to change these is the first guarantee of all rights. There is
not, and never can be, any fundamental, obligatory law for the entire
body of a people, not even the social contract." - It is through
usurpation and deception that a prince, an assembly, and a body of
magistrates declare themselves representatives of the people.
"Sovereignty is not to be represented for the same reason that it is
not to be ceded. . . . The moment a people gives itself
representatives it is no longer free, it exists no more. . . The
English people think themselves free but they deceive themselves; they
are free only during an election of members of parliament; on the
election of these they become slaves and are null. . . the deputies of
the people are not, nor can they be, its representatives; they are
simply its commissioners and can sign no binding final agreement.
Every law not ratified by the people themselves is null and is no
law."[17] -- "A body of laws sanctioned by an assembly of the people
through a fixed constitution of the State does not suffice; other
fixed and periodical assemblies are necessary which cannot be
abolished or extended, so arranged that on a given day the people may
be legitimately convoked by the law, no other formal conviction being
requisite. . . The moment the people are thus assembled the
jurisdiction of the government is to cease, and the executive power is
to be suspended," society commencing anew, while citizens, restored to
their primitive independence, may reconstitute at will, for any period
they determine, the provisional contract to which they have assented
only for a determined time. "The opening of these assemblies, whose
sole object is to maintain the social compact, should always take
place with two propositions, never suppressed, and which are to be
voted on separately; the first one, whether the sovereign( people) is
willing to maintain the actual form of the government; the second,
whether the people are willing to leave its administration in the
hands of those actually performing its duties." - Thus, "the act by
which a people is subject to its chiefs is absolutely only a
commission, a service in which, as simple officers of their sovereign,
they exercise in his name the power of which he has made them
depositories, and which he may modify, limit and resume at
pleasure."[18] Not only does it always reserve to itself "the
legislative power which belongs to it and which can belong only to
it," but again, it delegates and withdraws the executive power
according to its fancy. Those who exercise it are its employees. " It
may establish and depose them when it pleases." In relation to it they
have no rights. "It is not a matter of contract with them but one of
obedience;" they have "no conditions" to prescribe; they cannot demand
of it the fulfillment of any engagement. - It is useless to raise the
objection that, according to this, every man of spirit or of culture
will decline our offices, and that our chiefs will bear the character
of lackeys. We will not leave them the freedom of accepting or
declining office; we impose it on them authoritatively. "In every true
democracy the magistrature is not an advantage but an onerous burden,
not to be assigned to one more than to another." We can lay hands on
our magistrates, take them by the collar and set them on their benches
in spite of themselves. By fair means or foul they are the working
subjects (corvéables) of the State, in a lower condition than a valet
or a mechanic, since the mechanic does his work according to
acceptable conditions, and the discharged valet can claim his eight
days' notice to quit. As soon as the government throws off this humble
attitude it usurps, while constitutions are to proclaim that, in such
an event, insurrection is not only the most sacred right but the most
imperative duty. - The new theory is now put into practice, and the
dogma of the sovereignty of the people, interpreted by the crowd, is
to result in a complete anarchy, up to the moment when, interpreted by
its leaders, it produces perfect despotism.

IV. BIRTH OF SOCIALIST THEORY, ITS TWO SIDES.

The second result. - The new theory leads to despotism. -
Precedents for this theory. - Administrative centralization. - The
Utopia of the Economists. - Invalidity of preceding rights. -
Collateral associations not tolerated. - Complete alienation of the
individual from the community. - Rights of the State in relation to
property, education and religion. - The State a Spartan convent.

For this theory has two aspects; whereas one side leads towards
the perpetual demolition of government, the other results in the
unlimited dictatorship of the State. The new social contract is not a
historic pact, like the English Declaration of Rights in 1688, or the
Dutch federation in 1579, entered into by actual and living
individuals, admitting acquired situations, groups already formed,
established positions, and drawn up to recognize, define, guarantee
and complete anterior rights. Antecedent to the social contract no
veritable right exist; for veritable rights are born solely out of the
social contract, the only valid one, since it is the only one agreed
upon between beings perfectly equal and perfectly free, so many
abstract creatures, so many species of mathematical units, all of the
same value, all playing the same part and whose inequality or
constraint never disturbs the common understanding. Hence at the
moment of its completion, all other facts are nullified. Property,
family, church, no ancient institution may invoke any right against
the new State. The area on which it is built up must be considered
vacant; if old structures are partly allowed to remain it is only in
its name and for its benefit, to be enclosed within its barriers and
appropriated to its use; the entire soil of humanity is its property.
On the other hand it is not, according to the American doctrine, an
association for mutual protection, a society like other societies,
circumscribed in its purpose, restricted to its office, limited in its
powers, and by which individuals reserving to themselves the better
portion of their property and persons, assess each other for the
maintenance of an army, a police, tribunals, highways, schools, in
short, the major instruments of public safety and utility, at the same
time withholding the remainder of local, general, spiritual and
material services in favor of private initiative and of spontaneous
associations that may arise as occasion or necessity calls for them.
Our State is not to be a simple utilitarian machine, a convenient,
handy implement, of which the workman avails himself without
abandoning the free use of his hand, or the simultaneous use of other
implements. Being elder born, the only son and sole representative of
Reason it must, to ensure its sway, leave nothing beyond its grasp. -
In this respect the old régime paves the way for the new one, while
the established system inclines minds beforehand to the budding
theory. Through administrative centralization the State already, for a
long time, has its hands everywhere.[19]