In the case of the French Revolution, indeed, the wickedness of certain of its leaders was part of the retribution itself.For the noblesse existed surely to make men better.It did, by certain classes, the very opposite.Therefore it was destroyed by wicked men, whom it itself had made wicked.For over and above all political, economic, social wrongs, there were wrongs personal, human, dramatic; which stirred not merely the springs of covetousness or envy, or even of a just demand for the freedom of labour and enterprise: but the very deepest springs of rage, contempt, and hate; wrongs which caused, as I believe, the horrors of the Revolution.
It is notorious how many of the men most deeply implicated in those horrors were of the artist class--by which I signify not merely painters and sculptors--as the word artist has now got, somewhat strangely, to signify, at least in England--but what the French meant by ARTISTES--producers of luxuries and amusements, play-actors, musicians, and suchlike, down to that "distracted peruke-maker with two fiery torches," who, at the storm of the Bastile, "was for burning the saltpetres of the Arsenal, had not a woman run screaming; had not a patriot, with some tincture of natural philosophy, instantly struck the wind out of him, with butt of musket on pit of stomach, overturned the barrels, and stayed the devouring element." The distracted peruke-maker may have had his wrongs--perhaps such a one as that of poor Triboulet the fool, in "Le Roi s'amuse"--and his own sound reasons for blowing down the Bastile, and the system which kept it up.
For these very ministers of luxury--then miscalled art--from the periwig-maker to the play-actor--who like them had seen the frivolity, the baseness, the profligacy, of the rulers to whose vices they pandered, whom they despised while they adored! Figaro himself may have looked up to his master the Marquis as a superior being as long as the law enabled the Marquis to send him to the Bastile by a lettre de cachet; yet Figaro may have known and seen enough to excuse him, when lettres de cachet were abolished, for handing the Marquis over to a Comite de Salut Public.Disappointed play-actors, like Collet d'Herbois; disappointed poets, like Fabre d'Olivet, were, they say, especially ferocious.Why not?
Ingenious, sensitive spirits, used as lap-dogs and singing-birds by men and women whom they felt to be their own flesh and blood, they had, it may be, a juster appreciation of the actual worth of their patrons than had our own Pitt and Burke.They had played the valet:
and no man was a hero to them.They had seen the nobleman expose himself before his own helots: they would try if the helot was not as good as the nobleman.The nobleman had played the mountebank:
why should not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman? The nobleman's God had been his five senses, with (to use Mr.Carlyle's phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should not the mountebank worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see what grace and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?
But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than suspect, there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done to the sixth sense of vanity.Wrongs common to them, and to a great portion of the respectable middle class, and much of the lower class: but wrongs to which they and their families, being most in contact with the noblesse, would be especially exposed; namely, wrongs to women.
Everyone who knows the literature of that time, must know what Imean: what had gone on for more than a century, it may be more than two, in France, in Italy, and--I am sorry to have to say it--Germany likewise.All historians know what I mean, and how enormous was the evil.I only wonder that they have so much overlooked that item in the causes of the Revolution.It seems to me to have been more patent and potent in the sight of men, as it surely was in the sight of Almighty God, than all the political and economic wrongs put together.They might have issued in a change of dynasty or of laws.
That, issued in the blood of the offenders.Not a girl was enticed into Louis XV.'s Petit Trianon, or other den of aristocratic iniquity, but left behind her, parents nursing shame and sullen indignation, even while they fingered the ill-gotten price of their daughter's honour; and left behind also, perhaps, some unhappy boy of her own class, in whom disappointment and jealousy were transformed--and who will blame him?--into righteous indignation, and a very sword of God; all the more indignant, and all the more righteous, if education helped him to see, that the maiden's acquiescence, her pride in her own shame, was the ugliest feature in the whole crime, and the most potent reason for putting an end, however fearful, to a state of things in which such a fate was thought an honour and a gain, and not a disgrace and a ruin; in which the most gifted daughters of the lower classes had learnt to think it more noble to become--that which they became--than the wives of honest men.
If you will read fairly the literature of the Ancien Regime, whether in France or elsewhere, you will see that my facts are true.If you have human hearts in you, you will see in them, it seems to me, an explanation of many a guillotinade and fusillade, as yet explained only on the ground of madness--an hypothesis which (as we do not yet in the least understand what madness is) is no explanation at all.