The prestige of the great revolutionary days has been directly hit by the comparison with contemporary civil struggles; there was nothing during the Revolution which could bear comparison with the battles which ensanguined Paris in 1848 and in 1871; July 14 and August 10 seem to us now mere scuffles which would not have made an energetic Government tremble.
There is yet another reason, still hardly recognised by professional writers on revolutionary history, which has contributed a great deal towards taking all the romance out of these events. There can be no national epic about things which the people cannot picture to themselves as reproducible in a near future; popular poetry implies the future much more than the past; it is for this reason that the adventures of the Gauls, of Charlemagne, of the Crusades, of Joan of Arc cannot form the subject of a narrative capable of moving any but literary people.[1] Since the people have become convinced that contemporary Governments cannot be overthrown by riots like those of July 14 and August 10, they have ceased to look upon the events of these days as epical. Parliamentary Socialists, who would like to utilise the memory of the Revolution to excite the ardour of the people, and who ask them at the same time to put all their confidence in Parliamentarism, are very inconsistent, for they are themselves helping to ruin the epic, whose prestige they wish to maintain in their speeches.
But then what remains of the Revolution when we have taken away the epic of the wars against the coalition, and of that of the victories of the populace? What
- ↑ It is very remarkable that in the seventeenth century Boileau had already pronounced against the supernatural Christian epic; this was because his contemporaries, however religious they might have been, did not expect that angels would come to help Vauban to capture fortresses; they did not doubt what was related in the Bible, but they did not see matter in it for epics, because these marvels were not destined to be reproduced.
