Complete.

IDEAS rule the world and its events. A revolution is the passage of an idea from theory to practice. Whatever men have said, material interests never have caused, and never will cause, a revolution. Extreme poverty, financial ruin, oppressive or unequal taxation, may provoke risings that are more or less threatening or violent, but nothing more. Revolutions have their origin in the mind, in the very root of life; not in the body, in the material organism. A religion or a philosophy lies at the base of every revolution. This is a truth that can be proved from the whole historical tradition of humanity.

  Now, what were the ruling ideas in the period immediately preceding the revolution? What were the doctrines that hovered over its cradle? What was it that inspired and baptized its development and the various parties that promoted it? Did they go beyond the confines of the age of the individual and his rights? Did they initiate the age of duty; and of association, the only means of fulfilling duty?

  Three men, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, comprehended the whole intellectual movement of the eighteenth century, and exercised a visible and predominant influence on the development of the Revolution; Montesquieu, on the ideas of the Constituent Assembly; Rousseau, on the men of the Convention; Voltaire, on the beginnings of the movement and certain general tendencies that reappear intermittently to recall his name, and the indefatigable war he waged for fifty years against the traditions of the Church and the caprice of despotism.

  Voltaire’s genius was quick, subtle, acute, analytic, encyclopedic, but not profound; he was moved by good and philanthropic instincts rather than by strong and reasoned moral beliefs; a warrior rather than an apostle; a hater of evil rather than a worshiper of good; too much extolled by some, too much depreciated by others, Voltaire founded no doctrine, but, as I have said, popularized tendencies,—tendencies that existed already, and were almost innate in the French genius, but to which he gave new force and clothed in noble language,—tendencies which leak out in a number of the events of the Revolution, and, excepting the more rigid puritans of the Mountain, from Camille Desmoulins to Barras, influence, one might say, every actor of the period. They were philanthropic tendencies, inspired by momentary impulses of kindness rather than by a conception of life, and of its law,—tendencies of a vague, sterile, superficial deism, that relegated God to heaven and sundered his undying connection with the world, and which was merely a compromise between the tradition still extant in the popular mind, and the skepticism that, however covertly, dominated Voltaire and his followers,—tendencies of antagonism to every imposed authority, to every form of superstition and fanaticism, but born rather of a sense of rebellion natural to one who thinks than of faith in the destinies of those who have yet to learn to think,—tendencies that worshiped the rights of reason, but only for those individuals who by good fortune and education can share in them, and which were mingled with some spirit of contempt for the masses, a spirit which afterwards founded the fatal distinction between the popular and the bourgeois classes,—tendencies of equality, but confined, as in the philosophy of the Ancients, to one order of men, regardless of the rest. I have mentioned the bourgeois class, and Voltaire was, in fact, consciously or unconsciously, the teacher and master of the bourgeoisie, and his influence was all-powerful in the acts that, in the period just before the Revolution, traced the first lines of a division that has been more recently organized into a system, by Guizot and the French eclectic school. The bourgeosie of the two Bourbon revolutions idolized him. A man of impulses, of intuitions, rapid but short-lived, of enthusiasm, intellectual rather than moral, Voltaire, who displayed rare humanity in his efforts to clear the memory of Calas and the Sirven family, was flatterer at once of the Empress Catherine and King Frederic of Prussia. He sanctified their crimes; he burlesqued, in low comic verse, the heroic resistance of the Poles to the dismemberment of their Fatherland. An apostle of toleration in religious matters, he was the type of intolerance towards all his enemies, and capable of using any weapon, even calumny, to their prejudice. He waged a relentless, rabid war against Catholicism, and when threatened with death wrote a declaration of catholic faith and repentance. I write this as a debt to my own conscience, and because I see arising among our young men, who have neither studied all his works nor his life, an intemperate and dangerous admiration for him; but it is more important to my present purpose to note how Voltaire destroyed prejudices and errors, but neither built nor cared for the future. He had no perception (his historical works and his theory that great events depend upon little causes prove this) of a law dominating the life of humanity, no perception of progress, of a human mission, of duty, of association, or of anything that constitutes the end and the method of the new era that we invoke. He recognized no standard of good except in the rights of the individual. And like all who start from the idea of right alone, he could not help being forced to give the preference to rights already existing and recognized. He declared that “A State being a collection of lands and houses, those who possessed neither land nor house ought not to have any deliberative voice in the management of public affairs.” In one of the most beautiful moments of his long life, he gave full expression to the idea that guided him, when he uttered, under guise of a blessing on Franklin’s young son, the sacred but insufficient words—God and Liberty; a formula that opens the way to a possible initiative, but does not itself initiate. Liberty is a mere instrument of good or evil according to the path it chooses.

  Montesquieu, a more profound thinker than Voltaire, though less profound than some say, was the chief of a political school that had for its disciples, in the first period of the Revolution, Monnier, Malouet, and many others in the Assembly; Rivarol, Bergasse, Mallet Dupan, and others in the periodical press. The influence of the ideas he expounded in the Esprit des Lois is visible in the acts of the Constituent Assembly.

  His influence lay in his historical studies of antiquity, that would be thought superficial at the present day, but then appeared vast and almost unique. His intellect was acute, and swift in seizing the salient points of things; his aspirations were advanced; the expression of his thoughts vigorous. Montesquieu was at times unconsciously impelled, by his native logic, near to the unknown confines of the new age; but he was hindered by his lack of any religious conception of the life of humanity, by the prevailing theory of the ebb and flow of nations, perhaps, too, by the inevitable influences of a semi-patrician birth and the conditions of office; and so he retreated ever more and more towards the old age, and never, even in his most daring flights, crossed the limits of a period that began the transition. For an instant he caught a glimpse of the true definition of liberty, when he said that it consisted “in being able to do what one ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what one ought not to will.” But this was a momentary flash, an isolated saying, whose consequences he was unable to deduce. He suspected the existence of a general end, common to humanity, and a special end, belonging to each nation; but he was incapable of rising from that glimpse of an idea to the conception of a providential mission. He notes “that the object of Rome was aggrandizement; of Lacedæmonia, war; of the Judaic laws, religion; of Marseilles, commerce; of the barbarians, natural liberty”; but he never saw that those facts were only means to reach the end, and that the appointed end is general progressive civilization, the slow formation of a collective human unity. It is clear from twenty passages that he feels in his soul the superiority of the Republican form of government to all others; and yet, finding no body of principles that convert the intuition of the moment into a demonstrated truth, he concludes by laboring to teach how a monarchy may be durably established. He too, in all his researches, starts only from the individual, and so, like all who have no other criterion of truth, he can only grasp the notion of right. For him, as for the other philosophic thinkers of the time, there are rights consecrated by the fact of their existence, by prolonged possession; and the political program is reduced to efforts to find a place for them in the social organism, and to seek an impossible equilibrium that shall preserve the peace among them, and prevent one right from doing violence to another. Placed between a monarchy that said “France is mine,” an aristocracy powerful by past domination and an exclusive influence over the monarchy, and the first threatening murmurings of the Tiers État, Montesquieu did not pretend to pass judgment on those three forces, or ascertain the sum of vitality that existed in each, and which was doomed to early death, which destined to long life in the future. They existed, and he accepted them, consecrating the labor of his intellect to co-ordinate their existence and functions in the organization of the State. His ideal was the English system, the result, not of any conception of political philosophy, but of a unique historical development of causes and effects which existed nowhere else. His theory is that which we have seen in practice for more than half a century under the name of constitutional monarchy, where the search for an equilibrium between the three elements of Crown, and Nobility, and Commons, has everywhere condemned the peoples to alternate between stagnation, reaction, and periodic revolution.

  The problem, therefore, in the Esprit des Lois is vitiated by a fundamental error. Montesquieu labors heavily about the distinction between the three powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, and makes this the cardinal point of the whole question; he thus, by exaggerating this distinction, destroys the conception of national unity. The real, the sole, the vital question should be, for him as for us all, the question of sovereignty; what is its origin, and where its interpretation is to be sought with the least uncertainty and the greatest probability.

  There does not, and ought not to exist more than one law; it is its application to the diverse branches of social life that implies a distinction in the higher branches of the administration between the different functions delegated to provide for its execution. Just as the exaggeration of the triple aspect of life in God changed little by little the three different aspects of divine action into Three Persons, and founded a Tri-theism in religion opposed to the conception of Unity, so the theory of rights, and hence of acquired rights, impelled Montesquieu to discover powers where they did not exist, and found a political Tri-theism which has survived even to this day, and impairs every conception of national organization. Having raised these social elements to powers, he confers on them attributes which suffice to break up the harmony of the State. He was confronted by the danger, either of antagonism between the three powers, or compulsory stagnation; but he replied with superficial carelessness, “that, as they were urged forward by the necessary movement of things, they would be constrained to move in unison.”

  Montesquieu abounds in false ideas respecting the hereditary nature of the aristocracy, the function of the monarchy, the rights conceded to the executive over the legislative, and many other questions. But it is not my task to notice them. It is sufficient for my purpose to have reminded my readers of the thought that dominates his conceptions. He has no criterion outside that of the individual. He reaches no formula of political organization beyond that of rights. He has no scope, no mission to suggest for the State, except liberty, and by liberty he understands, in the general course of his work, nothing more than “the citizen’s consciousness of his own safety, and of having nothing to fear from any other citizen.” Political science is therefore narrowed to a science of limits, of mutual defense. And the government deprived of any other mission is to use the force of society to watch that those limits are not overstepped by violence. A religious conception, the law of progress, duty, association, the end assigned to humanity and to each people, collective education, and the office of the press to gradually promote the unity of the human family, everything, in short, that is characteristic of the age we call for, is unknown to the man who inspired the Constituent Assembly.

  Montesquieu was neither inspirer nor prophet of an age. He summarized, with singular acumen, the conditions and consequences of political laws as he found them, incomplete or in partial activity, in the period in which he lived. He sketched in outline, not always, but frequently exact, the existing tradition, but nothing more. When we point to him, at the present time, as the master of future legislation, we commit the same error as when we make poor Machiavelli the guardian of the cradle of reborn Italy—Machiavelli, who anatomized the dead body of old Italy and showed the wounds that caused her death; when we take Adam Smith—who was but the wise exponent of the laws that governed the economic phenomena of his time—and make him the founder of an immutable science, the teacher of an age in which the economic relations between class and class are hastening to an inevitable change.

  Rousseau, the inspirer of the Convention, followed another road, but without passing the confines of the age that France was preparing to summarize. A poor plebeian, without deep study of the past, abhorring the times in the consciousness of his own superiority, and for the exaggerated demands of society as he found it, he, on the great political questions of the day, questioned only his own intelligence and the intuitions of the heart. His intelligence was more powerful than that of Montesquieu; his heart was led astray by a leaven of egotism that too often soured his natural inclination to good; and both together drove him to the principle that takes its birth, if not its consecration, from him—the principle of popular sovereignty. A true principle, if considered as the best method of interpreting a supreme moral law which a nation has accepted as its guide, which is solemnly declared in its contract and transmitted by national education; but a false and anarchical principle if proclaimed in the name of force, or in the name of a convention, and abandoned to the caprice of majorities, uneducated, and corrupted by a false conception of life.

  For Rousseau, the popular sovereignty remained in these last terms, uncertain, ineffective, shifting. He, too, had no conception of the collective life of humanity, of its tradition, of the law of progress appointed for the generations, of a common end towards which we ought to strive, of association that can alone attain it step by step. Starting from the philosophy of the ego end of individual liberty, he robbed that principle of fruit by basing it, not on a duty common to all, not on a definition of man as an essentially social creature, not on the conception of a divine authority and a providential design, not on the bond that unites the individual to humanity of which he is a factor, but on a simple convention, avowed or understood. All Rousseau’s teaching proceeds from the assertion “that social right is not derived from nature, but is based upon conventions.” He drives this doctrine so far as to comprehend the family itself within it. “Sons,” he says, “do not remain united to their fathers except so long as they have need of them for their preservation…. From that time forth the family is only maintained in virtue of a convention.”

  From the doctrine that recognizes the rights of the contracting individuals as the only source of social life, nothing could result but a political system capable of protecting, within the limits of a narrow possibility, the liberty and equality of each citizen; and Rousseau has no other program. “The aim of every system of legislation”—these are his very words—“reduces itself to two principal objects, liberty and equality; and to find a form of society that shall defend and protect with all the collective forces the person and the property of each associate, and in which each one, uniting himself to all, shall obey only himself and remain as free as he was before; this is the fundamental problem.” Stated in these terms, the problem contains neither the elements of normal progress, nor the possibility of solving the social economic question that is so prominently agitating men’s minds in our time. An isolated sentence in the book seems to lay down the principle that “no citizen ought to be rich enough to be in a position to buy another; none poor enough to be constrained to sell himself”; this is just, but it does not connect itself with the general bearing of the principles he expounds, nor is there any indication how it may be reduced to fact. It is of little importance that in many particulars he is superior to every other thinker of that period. The Society of Rousseau, like that of Montesquieu, is a mutual insurance society, and nothing more.

  That first statement, the key of the whole system, is by now proven to be false; and, because false, fatal to the development of the principle of popular sovereignty. It is not by the force of conventions or of aught else, but by a necessity of our nature, that societies are founded and grow. Each of us is a part of humanity, each of us lives its life, each is called upon to live for it, to aid the attainment of the end assigned to it, to realize, as far as possible in each one of us, the ideal type, the divine thought that guides it. Law is one and the same for individual and collective life, both of which are the expression of a single universal phenomenon, differently modified by space and time. And life, we know now, is progress. If you throw over moral authority, our natural tendencies, our mission, and substitute the merely human authority of conventions as the source of social development, you risk arresting that development, or subjecting it to arbitrary caprice. And since you need the consent of all the contracting parties to dissolve these conventions and make a change for the better, you are threatened, on the one hand by the power of every minority, logically indeed of every individual, to stop you; on the other hand, inasmuch as the prolonged existence of a fact pre-supposes, at all events, a tacit convention, you are threatened by the necessity of perpetuating rights and powers that are not founded on justice, or conducive to the common good. No “man” has, you say, “natural authority over his fellows; might cannot create right; therefore conventions are left as the only basis of legitimate authority.” But is there not an authority higher than any man, in the True, the Just, the end which we have set before us and which we are bound above all things to discover? Is not some of that authority passed on to the people or to that fraction of the people which is its best interpreter? And, to discover that end, do we not possess the double criterion supplied when the tradition of humanity and the conscience of our times both harmonize? And for a method of practical verification, can we not examine whether this item of discovered truth profits or not the common progress? Rousseau believed in God, but in his study of human phenomena he continually forgot him.

  Rousseau believed in God. He believed—and it is well to remind of this those republican materialists who venerate the “Contrat Social”—that a State could not be established without having religion for its foundation. And he pushed this belief to the fanaticism of intolerance, declaring that the sovereign power could exile from the State all who disbelieved in God and immortality, and condemn any citizen to death who, after publicly confessing his belief in those dogmas, by his subsequent conduct convicted himself of deliberate falsehood. But he confined himself within a narrow deism that placed God far off in heaven, and never understood his universal, never-dying life manifested in creation; he was ignorant of the law of progress—the sole but potent and living mediator between God and humanity; he was fettered by the individualist’s philosophy; he had no glimpse of any religion besides Christianity, and so he was incapable of deducing and applying the logical consequences of his faith to society.

  Like Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau was not the intellectual herald of the age. His conception, though more daring, more explicit, more advanced than theirs, never passes the limits of the individualist world, elaborated by the Pagan-Christian age. The influence of the three schools with which these names are associated could not push the Revolution beyond those limits to the world of progress and association for which we are now fighting.