Proper attention has not always been given to the great changes which have taken place since 1870 in the way people judge the revolution; yet these changes must be considered if we wish to understand contemporary ideas relative to violence.

For a very long time the Revolution appeared to be essentially a succession of glorious wars, which a people famished for liberty and carried away by the noblest passions had maintained against a coalition of all the powers of oppression and error. Riots and coups d'état, the struggles between parties often destitute of any scruple and the banishment of the vanquished, the Parliamentary debates and the adventures of illustrious men, in a word, all the events of its political history were in the eyes of our fathers only very secondary accessories to the wars of liberty.

For about twenty-five years the form of government in France had been at issue; after campaigns before which the memories of Caesar and Alexander paled the charter of 1814 had definitely incorporated in the national tradition, the Parliamentary system, Napoleonic legislation, and the Church established by the Concordat; war had given an irrevocable judgment whose preambles, as Proudhon said, had been dated from Valmy, from Jemmapes, and from fifty other battlefields, and whose conclusions had been received at Saint-Ouen by Louis XVIII. Protected by the prestige of the wars of liberty, the new institutions had become inviolable, and the ideology which was built up to explain them became a faith which seemed for a long time to have for the French the value which the revelation of Jesus has for the Catholics.

From time to time eloquent writers have thought that they could set up a current of reaction against these doctrines, and the Church had hopes that it might get the better of what it called the error of liberalism. A long period of admiration for medieval art and of contempt for the period of Voltaire seemed to threaten the new ideology with ruin; but all these attempts to return to the past left no trace except in literary history. There were times when those in power governed in the least liberal manner, but the principles of the modem régime were never seriously threatened. This fact could not be explained by the power of reason and by some law of progress; its cause lies simply in the epic of the wars 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.” 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 search for the most suitable means of setting the country on its feet again. Taine endeavoured to apply the methods of the most scientific psychology to this question, and he looked upon the history of the Revolution as a social experiment. He hoped to be able to make quite clear the danger presented in his opinion by the Jacobin spirit, and thus to induce his contemporaries to change the course of French politics by abandoning ideas which had seemed incorporated in the national tradition, and which were all the more solidly rooted in people’s minds because nobody had ever discussed their origin. Taine failed in his enterprise, as Le Play and Renan failed, as all those will fail who try to found an intellectual and moral reform on investigations, on scientific syntheses, and on demonstrations.

Georges Sorel - Reflections on Violence (via freiherr-von-ofterdingen)