France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799 -- Causes; Revolutions; Social psychology
Few peoples have succeeded in effecting a just equilibrium
between these two contrary qualities of stability and
malleability. The Romans in antiquity and the English in modern
times may be cited among those who have best attained it.
The peoples whose mind is most fixed and established often effect
the most violent revolutions. Not having succeeded in evolving
progressively, in adapting themselves to changes of environment,
they are forced to adapt themselves violently when such
adaptation becomes indispensable.
Stability is only acquired very slowly. The history of a race is
above all the story of its long efforts to establish its mind.
So long as it has not succeeded it forms a horde of barbarians
without cohesion and strength. After the invasions of the end of
the Roman Empire France took several centuries to form a national
soul.
She finally achieved one; but in the course of centuries this
soul finally became too rigid. With a little more malleability,
the ancient monarchy would have been slowly transformed as it was
elsewhere, and we should have avoided, together with the
Revolution and its consequences, the heavy task of remaking a
national soul.
The preceding considerations show us the part of race in the
genesis of revolutions, and explain why the same revolutions will
produce such different effects in different countries; why, for
example, the ideas of the French Revolution, welcomed with
such enthusiasm by some peoples, were rejected by others.
Certainly England, although a very stable country, has suffered
two revolutions and slain a king; but the mould of her mental
armour was at once stable enough to retain the acquisitions of
the past and malleable enough to modify them only within the
necessary limits. Never did England dream, as did the men of the
French Revolution, of destroying the ancestral heritage in order
to erect a new society in the name of reason.
``While the Frenchman,'' writes M. A. Sorel, ``despised his
government, detested his clergy, hated the nobility, and revolted
against the laws, the Englishman was proud of his religion, his
constitution, his aristocracy, his House of Lords. These were
like so many towers of the formidable Bastille in which he
entrenched himself, under the British standard, to judge Europe
and cover her with contempt. He admitted that the command was
disputed inside the fort, but no stranger must approach.''
The influence of race in the destiny of the peoples appears
plainly in the history of the perpetual revolutions of the
Spanish republics of South America. Composed of half-castes,
that is to say, of individuals whose diverse heredities have
dissociated their ancestral characteristics, these populations
have no national soul and therefore no stability. A people of
half-castes is always ungovernable.
If we would learn more of the differences of political capacity
which the racial factor creates we must examine the same nation
as governed by two races successively.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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