328 Chapter XIV
which had had irresistible attractions for the upper classes offered after 1789 at-
tractions equally irresistible to the lower. This fact made the French Revolution
more shocking and unintelligible to beneficiaries of the old order everywhere. It
distinguishes it also from the Russian and other twentieth- century revolutions,
whose resemblance to the French, of which much has been made, would be the
greater if Marx’s revolution had first come about, as he and Lenin expected, in an
advanced capitalist country such as England or Germany.
The French Revolution went beyond all others of the period in its scope. It re-
mained primarily political, like other movements of the time, on the supposition
that all spheres of life were to be transformed by reorganization of the state, along
with introduction of new laws or abolition of old ones. But in its effects on society
and social and moral attitudes it went far beyond the merely political, more so than
the American Revolution, and much more so than anything contemplated by the
Polish, Dutch, Belgian, Genevese, English, or Irish reformers or revolutionaries
described in the preceding pages. The French Revolution changed the very nature
and definition of property, and to some extent its distribution; it transformed, or
attempted to transform, the church, the army, the educational system, institutions
of public relief, the legal system, the market economy, and the relationship of em-
ployers and employees. It introduced new crucial values, new status strivings, new
levels of expectation. It changed the essence of the community and of the indi-
vidual’s sense of his membership in it and his relationship to fellow citizens and
fellow men. It even changed the feeling for history, or the idea of what could or
ought to happen in history and in the world. Leopold von Ranke once remarked
that the growth of historical studies in the nineteenth century was a form of reac-
tion against the Napoleonic empire. As much might be said for the French Revo-
lution and the European Revolution of which it was the largest part. A whole
system of civilization seemed to have fallen, and a new one to be struggling to be
born; and men of all shades of opinion, whether to further such a change or to op-
pose it, took a new view of the possibilities, the hopes, the delusions, and the dan-
gers in the evolution of the human race itself.
The Problem of the French Revolution
For so vast an upheaval vast explanations have usually been found. It has been the
habit of historians and political commentators to set the Revolution in a long con-
text of centuries, finding for it distant origins and underlying causes. Thus for
Hegel the Revolution represented the emancipation of Mind, the point in history
at which Mind, becoming fully conscious, set about determining the conditions of
its further existence in the world. For Hegel, for liberals and for democrats, the
Revolution was one of a very few great events, such as the introduction of Christi-
anity and the Protestant Reformation, by which the slow growth of freedom had
been attained. For Tocqueville it was a climax in the age- long movement toward
equality of conditions and growth of central power and public authority. For Marx
it signalized the victory of the bourgeois over the feudal order. For Carlyle and for