Tonya Allen, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
There are two ways in which the French Revolution may be considered. Wemay look at the great events which astonished and horrified Europe andAmerica: the storming of the Bastille, the march on Versailles, themassacres of September, the Terror, and the restoration of order byNapoleon. The study of these events must always be both interesting andprofitable, and we cannot wonder that historians, scenting theapproaching battle, have sometimes hurried over the comparativelypeaceful country that separated them from it. They have accepted easyand ready-made solutions for the cause of the trouble. Old France hasbeen lurid in their eyes, in the light of her burning country-houses.The Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, they think, must have beenwretches, or they could not so have suffered. The social fabric, theyare sure, was rotten indeed, or it would never have gone to pieces sosuddenly.
There is, however, another way of looking at that great revolution ofwhich we habitually set the beginning in 1789. That date is, indeed,momentous; more so than any other in modern history. It marks theoutbreak in legislation and politics of ideas which had already beenworking for a century, and which have changed the face of the civilizedworld. These ideas are not all true nor all noble. They have in them alarge admixture of speculative error and of spiritual baseness. Theyrequire to-day to be modified and readjusted. But they represent sidesof truth which in 1789, and still more in 1689, were too much overlookedand neglected. They suited the stage of civilization which the world hadreached, and men needed to emphasize them. Their very exaggeration wasperhaps necessary to enable them to fight, and in a measure to supplant,the older doctrines which were in possession of the human mind.Induction, as the sole method of reasoning, sensation as the sole originof ideas, may not be the final and only truth; but they were very muchneeded in the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, andthey found philosophers to elaborate them, and enthusiasts to preachthem. They made their way chiefly on French soil in the decadespreceding 1789.
The history of French society at that time has of late years attractedmuch attention in France. Diligent scholars have studied it from manysides. I have used their work freely, and acknowledgment will be foundin the foot-notes; but I cannot resist the pleasure of mentioning inthis preface a few of those to whom I am most indebted; and first M.Albert Babeau, without whose careful researches several chapters of thisbook could hardly have been written. His studies in archives, as well asin printed memoirs and travels, have brought much of the daily life ofold France into the clearest light. He has in an eminent degree thegreat and thoroughly French quality of telling us what we want to know.His impartiality rivals his lucidity, while his thoroughness is suchthat it is hard gleaning the old fields after him.
Hardly less is my indebtedness to the late M. Aimé Chérest, whoseunfinished work, "La Chute de l'ancien régime," gives the mostinteresting and philosophical narrative of the later political eventspreceding the meeting of the Estates General. To the great names of deTocqueville and of Taine I can but render a passing homage. The formermay be said to have opened the modern mind to the proper method ofstudying the eighteenth century in France, the latter is, per