Despite these restrictions his work is highly remarkable and has not been equalled. We may judge of his immense influence by the exasperation which he causes among the faithful defenders of Jacobin orthodoxy, of which M. Aulard, professor at the Sorbonne, is to-day the high priest. The latter has devoted two years to writing a pamphlet against Taine, every line of which is steeped in passion. All this time spent in rectifying a few material errors which are not really significant has only resulted in the perpetration of the very same errors. Reviewing his work, M. A. Cochin shows that M. Aulard has at least on every other occasion been deceived by his quotations, whereas Taine erred far more rarely. The same historian shows also that we must not trust M. Aulard's sources. ``These sources--proceedings, pamphlets, journals, and the speeches and writings of patriots--are precisely the authentic publications of patriotism, edited by patriots, and edited, as a rule, for the benefit of the public. He ought to have seen in all this simply the special pleading of the defendant: he had, before his eyes, a ready-made history of the Revolution, which presents, side by side with each of the acts of the `People,' from the massacres of September to the law of Prairial, a ready- made explanation according to the republican system of defence.'' Perhaps the fairest criticism that one can make of the work of Taine is that it was left incomplete. He studied more especially the role of the populace and its leaders during the revolutionary period. This inspired him with pages vibrating with an indignation which we can still admire, but several important aspects of the Revolution escaped him. Whatever one may think of the Revolution, an irreducible difference will always exist between historians of the school of Taine and those of the school of M. Aulard. The latter regards the sovereign people as admirable, while the former shows us that when abandoned to its instincts and liberated from all social restraint it relapses into primitive savagery. The conception of M. Aulard, entirely contrary to the lessons of the psychology of crowds, is none the less a religious dogma in the eyes of modern Jacobins. They write of the Revolution according to the methods of believers, and take for learned works the arguments of virtual theologians. 2. The Theory of Fatalism in respect of the Revolution. Advocates and detractors of the Revolution often admit the fatality of revolutionary events. This theory is well synthetised in the following passage from the History of the Revolution, by Emile Olivier:-- ``No man could oppose it. The blame belongs neither to those who perished nor to those who survived; there was no individual force capable of changing the elements and of foreseeing the events which were born of the nature of things and circumstances.'' Taine himself inclines to this idea:--