708 Chapter XXIX
life of its own.^62 In an empirical view, the Revolution could be seen as an episode, a
crisis in affairs, momentous indeed, but still within the pale of comprehensible
politics, arising from a breakdown of the old government, involving understand-
able conflicts of interest, aiming at a future state of society that could at least be
foreseen and described in words, subject to criticism for its success or failure, for
the wisdom or unwisdom of its measures, or for the moral implications of the
means adopted in the pursuit of ends. Among the real revolutionaries of France,
including Robespierre, some such view prevailed on the whole, though in France
also there were some who glorified revolution for its own sake. Such was not the
view taken in Germany either by excited but frustrated revolutionaries without a
revolution, or by counter- revolutionaries desiring to argue that revolution was
aimless chaos.
“The lava of revolution flows majestically on, sparing nothing. Who can resist
it?”^63 It was the Mainz Jacobin Georg Forster who wrote these words. Longing for
revolution, he was pleased by the thought of its “irresistibility,” though Robes-
pierre, as a real revolutionary, found much to resist, such as the “ultras,” in a real
revolution. The image of flowing lava, since it made the Revolution seem mindless
and inhuman, could appeal to counter- revolutionaries as well as to merely poten-
tial, incipient, frustrated, or spectator- type revolutionaries. There is no room here
to go into the arcana of German romanticism, in which men like Schlegel and
Novalis, while rejecting revolutionary republicanism, looked for a vast outburst of
vitalistic and creative life forces to regenerate the world. The rational and politi-
cally minded Friederich Gentz, no romantic, began in 1793 to characterize events
in France as eine Total- Revolution. Repeatedly he contrasted the American Revo-
lution, constructive and rational, with the French Revolution, which he saw as a
vast, boundless, all- consuming, blind force, aiming at unrealizable goals, or with no
goals except violence and upheaval. The French revolutionaries imagined that
when their revolution was over, civil peace would follow. It was Gentz and the
counter- revolution that thought otherwise, who saw in France a destructive force
that would “favor other revolutions into infinity... lead to a succession of revolu-
tions, and turn human society into a theater of never ending civil war.”^64
The accuracy of this interpretation is a matter of judgment. It was at least a way
of taking attention from the announced goals of the movement, such as liberty and
equality. The irony is that the idea of a dynamic, continuing, and perpetual revolu-
tion, of revolution as an elemental or historic force rather than as a political expe-
dient to be rarely used, arose at least as much in Germany as in France, and at least
as much among conservatives as among revolutionary democrats and republicans.
62 The argument of K. Griewank, Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff (Weimar, 1955), in the chap-
ter on “Der dynamische Revolutionsbegrift und die Gegenrevolution,” 240–59.
63 Quoted by Griewank, 243.
64 Ibid., 248– 49.