278 Chapter XI
If these events prove anything, it is perhaps that no purely middle- class or
“bourgeois” revolution could succeed. Lawyers, bankers, merchants, shopkeepers,
students, and professors could not alone unseat the holders of political power. They
had done their best: they and their sons had armed and drilled; they had formed
armed companies or national guards in Ireland, Holland, Belgium, and Geneva.
They had gone down, in Holland and at Geneva, before a regular or foreign army.
One reason was the lack of experience of the burgher class in military service and
military command. In the latter the aristocracy still had all the advantages. The
Dutch Patriots had called on a French army officer to take command against the
Prussians—with unfortunate results. The Americans had learned a good deal from
French and European professional officers. Another reason for the democratic fail-
ure, applying at least to Holland, Belgium, and Geneva, was that these countries
had the misfortune to be small, and hence easy objects for intervention. The at-
tempt of conservative Europe to intervene in France in 1792 was to have a very
different outcome.
“The French Revolution,” Albert Schweitzer once observed, “is a snowstorm
falling on trees in blossom.”^74 The eminent humanitarian echoed in these words a
common idea, evoking the picture of a humane, tolerant, open- minded, moderate,
increasingly liberal, and satisfactorily progressing Age of Enlightenment, unfortu-
nately cut short by violent and sanguinary popular revolt. The corollary is that an
inflexible conservatism appeared after, and in reaction to, the French Revolution.
Readers of the preceding chapters, if they at all agree with the author, will find it
hard to see the trees in blossom, and may be prepared to think, as the following
chapters will to some extent show, that revolution was itself a reaction against an
immovable conservatism already formed.
The two sides were taking shape before 1789. Aristocrats and democrats, known
by these names, had already been at each other’s throats. Revolutions had been at-
tempted, and counterrevolutionary doctrine was already in the making. Demo-
crats, though moderate in their actual proposals, did speak of the Majesty of the
Nation and the Sovereignty of the People. They questioned the legitimacy of the
Orders, and of church membership as a qualification for political rights. Such ideas
did in fact undermine the constitutions of all European countries as they then ex-
isted. Conservatives were not mistaken in making this diagnosis. What they may
more reasonably be blamed for is that they provided no means of lawful readjust-
ment, insisted on the immutability of the existing arrangements, and failed to see
what they later blamed radicals for failing to see, the wisdom or desirability of
evolutionary change.
The artillery soon to be directed against the French Revolution had already been
perfected in lesser engagements. The American Revolution was the work of “me-
chanics and country clowns”—it was a South Carolina Anglican clergyman who
said so. America was “in a state of dreadful confusion,” according to Burke in 1779.
It suffered, said the American Galloway, from its own “Wickedness and Folly”
under a regime that was “Tyrannical and oppressive.” The authors of the Irish Re-
form Bill were “system mongers.” Those of the English reform bill really wanted to
74 Philosophy of Civilization (N.Y., 1949), 176.