which had filled the French soul with an enthusiasm analogous to that provoked by religions.
This miltary epic gave an epical colour to all the events of internal politics; party struggles were thus raised to the level of an Iliad; politicians became giants, and the revolution, which Joseph de Maistre had denounced as satanical, was made divine. The bloody scenes of the Terror were episodes without great significance by the side of the enormous hecatombs of war, and means were found to envelop them in a dramatic mythology; riots were elevated to the same rank as illustrious battles; and calmer historians vainly endeavoured to bring the Revolution and the Empire down to the plane of common history. The prodigious triumphs of the revolutionary and imperial arms rendered all criticism impossible.
The war of 1870 changed all that. At the moment of the fall of the Second Empire the immense majority in France still firmly believed the legends which had been spread about regarding the armies of volunteers, the miraculous rôle of the representatives of the people, and the improvised generals; experience produced a cruel disillusion. Tocqueville had written: "The Convention created the policy of the impossible, the theory of furious madness, the cult of blind audacity."[1] The disasters of 1870 brought the country back to practical, prudent, and prosaic conditions; the first result of these disasters was the development of the conception most opposed to that spoken of by Tocqueville; this was the idea of opportunism, which has now been introduced even into Socialism.
Another consequence was the change that took place in all revolutionary values, and notably the modification in the opinions which were held on the subject of violence.
After 1871 everybody in France thought only of the
- ↑ Tocqueville, Mélanges, p. 189.
