332 Chapter XIV
really existed. The key words of the Revolution were not always misunderstood by
the revolutionaries, nor were they mere arrangements of syllables. Robespierre did
not really work for a paradise, nor expect the new France to be syllogistic. The ideas
of the Revolution, even when most exaggerated or fantastic, had an actual base.
The real problem of the French Revolution is to explain why it was so radical at
the very beginning. In a way the first leaders, those of June and July 1789, were
moderate enough. Intending no violence, and with no expectation of mass up-
heaval, they would have preferred to work harmoniously with Louis XVI at the
task of national reorganization, and most of them would have been satisfied to
obtain, in 1789, about what Louis XVIII was to concede in 1814. The rush of
events was soon to make them realize how moderate they really were, for much
was to happen that the original leaders could not accept. Nevertheless, it can be
misleading to think of a “moderate” revolution of 1789 which took more extreme
forms in 1792 and 1793. The contrary could as well be maintained: that it was the
alleged moderates of 1789 who in a few rapid strokes destroyed the existing order,
leaving what Taine disapprovingly called a spontaneous anarchy, and the half-
million little men of the Jacobin clubs of 1793, who in an enormous wave of citi-
zen self- help, having ousted their former rulers or been deserted by them, and with
no new institutions yet accepted and effectively functioning, undertook to consoli-
date the revolutionary program, maintain a government, and carry on an interna-
tional war in the face of military invasion.
Edmund Burke, in his Reflections written in 1790, was right enough in perceiv-
ing the radicalism of the Revolution at its outset. By “radicalism” I mean a deep
estrangement from the existing order, an insistence upon values incompatible with
those embodied in actual institutions, a refusal to entertain projects of compro-
mise, a mood of impatience, suspicion, and exasperation, an embittered class con-
sciousness reaching the point of hatred, a determination to destroy and to create,
and a belief that both destruction and creation would be relatively easy. In such a
mood the men of 1789 took steps which never could be retracted. The Oath of the
Tennis Court, the decrees of August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, the repudiation of legal class, the relegation of the King to the position of
a first magistrate, the expropriation of the church, all accomplished or at least pro-
claimed before the end of 1789, were a series of such irrevocable commitments.
They left no room for maneuver, for tactical retreat, for gaining time, for gradual-
ism, for conciliation, or for convenient silence on general principles. They publi-
cized and they maximized an absolute difference of principle between the old re-
gime and the new. What followed flowed as a consequence from this initial work.
It has been said, notably by Aulard, that the rest of the Revolution was mainly
“defensive,” and this is offered in justification of the unpleasantness that followed;
but if defensive, it was defense of the advanced position taken in 1789, and one
that was tenable only with difficulty because of the opposition that it aroused.
Nor was this radicalism of 1789 to be found only in the assembly which sat
from May to October at Versailles and thereafter at Paris. The real revolution
erupted throughout the country as a whole, in the agrarian rebellions of the sum-
mer, and in the municipal revolutions of Paris and the hundreds of towns, great
and small, throughout the length and breadth of the provinces, where new men