It was under the impression of this disaster that Taine set to work to investigate the past {6} of his country, and particularly the great Revolution on which all else appeared to be founded. Between 1875 and 1894 he produced his _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, which in a sense supplanted all previous works on the Revolution. Behind it could be plainly perceived a huge scaffolding of erudite labour, and the working of an intellect of abnormal power; but what was not so apparent, and is now only being slowly recognised, was that much of this erudition was hasty and inspired by preconceived opinions, and that Taine's genius was more philosophic than historic. Assuming the validity of the impressions he had formed when witnessing the agony of Paris in the spring of 1871, his history of the Revolution was a powerful and brilliant vindication of those impressions. But it is only the philosopher who forms his opinions before considering the facts, the historian instinctively reverses the order of these phenomena. As it was, Taine's great work made a tremendous impact on the intellect of his generation, and nearly all that has been written on the Revolution since his day is marked with his mark. His thesis was that the Church and the State were the great institutions whereby brute man had acquired his small share of justice and {7} reason, and that to hack at the root of both State and Church was fatal; it could only lead to the dictatorship of the soldier or to that of the mob. Of these two evils the former appeared to him the less, while the latter he could only think of in terms of folly and outrage. Taine's conservatism was the reaction of opinion against the violence of the Commune and the weak beginnings of the Third Republic, as Michelet's liberalism had been its reaction against Orleanist and Bonapartist middle class and military dictation. Since Taine's great book, the influence of which is, in this year 1909, only just beginning to fade, what have we had? Passing over von Sybel's considerable and popular history of the Revolution, we have Sorel's _L'Europe et la Revolution francaise_, more historical, more balanced than Taine's work, clear in style and in arrangement, but on the whole superficial in ideas and incorrect in details. Of far deeper significance is the _Histoire Socialiste_ of Jean Jaures, of which the title is too narrow; _Histoire du peuple_, or _Histoire des classes ouvrieres_, would have more closely defined the scope of this remarkable work. Here we have a new phenomenon, history written for the labouring class and from the point of {8} view of the labouring class. And although not free from the taint of the party pamphlet, not of the first rank for historical erudition, intellectual force or artistic composition, Jaures' history presents the Revolution under the aspect that gives most food for thought and that places it most directly in touch with the problems of the present.