``At the moment when the States General were opened the course of ideas and events was not only determined but even visible. Each generation unwittingly bears within itself its future and its past; from the latter its destinies might have been foretold long before the issue.'' Other modern authors, who profess no more indulgence for the violence of the revolutionaries than did Taine, are equally convinced of this fatality. M. Sorel, after recalling the saying of Bossuet concerning the revolutions of antiquity: ``Everything is surprising if we only consider particular causes, and yet everything goes forward in regular sequence,'' expresses an intention which he very imperfectly realises: ``to show in the Revolution, which seems to some the subversion and to others the regeneration of the old European world, the natural and necessary result of the history of Europe, and to show, moreover, that this revolution had no result--not even the most unexpected--that did not ensue from this history, and was not explained by the precedents of the ancien regime.'' Guizot also had formerly attempted to prove that our Revolution, which he quite wrongly compared to that of England, was perfectly natural and effected no innovations:-- ``Far from having broken with the natural course of events in Europe, neither the English revolution nor our own did, intended, or said anything that had not been said, intended, and done a hundred years before its outbreak. `` . . . Whether we regard the general doctrines of the two revolutions or the application made of them--whether we deal with the government of the State or with the civil legislation, with property or with persons, with liberty or with power, we shall find nothing of which the invention can be attributed to them, nothing that will not be encountered elsewhere, or that was not at least originated in times which we qualify as normal.'' All these assertions merely recall the banal law that a phenomenon is simply the consequence of previous phenomena. Such very general propositions do not teach us much. We must not try to explain too many events by the principle of fatality adopted by so many historians. I have elsewhere discussed the significance of such fatalities, and have shown that the whole effort of civilisation consists in trying to escape therefrom. Certainly history is full of necessities, but it is also full of contingent facts which were, and might not have been. Napoleon himself, on St. Helena, enumerated six circumstances which might have checked his prodigious career. He related, notably, that on taking a bath at Auxonne, in 1786, he only escaped death by the fortuitous presence of a sandbank. If Bonaparte had died, then we may admit that another general would have arisen, and might have become dictator. But what would have become of the Imperial epic and its consequences without the man of genius who led our victorious armies into all the capitals of Europe?