Cahier d'annonces
Cahier of Announcements
For more than two weeks the atrocious duel engaged between the Petite République and the Petit Sou has been verifying superabundantly everything we have said since the founding of our cahiers. But we shall not be the wicked prophet who rejoices at the wicked event.
We shall not intervene in this dreadful duel. We shall record it later, as historians, if need be, when it has momentarily exhausted its effects. For the present, our sentiments are those of the true militants.
Hubert Lagardelle, who has just returned from a long and heartening tour through the valleys of the Saône and the Rhône, told us on his return that he had seen militants with tears in their eyes as they read that the administration of the Petite République had sent to the syndicate of Le Creusot the sum of 2,292 francs 45. A friend in Paris tells us that he has seen militants weeping in his arrondissement. Our sentiments are the same.
It is lamentable that the most loathsome of bourgeois bandits, M. Edwards, by the power of his filthy millions, lays down the law in one half of the socialist party. It is lamentable that the Guesdists, the Blanquists, eat this man’s bread and drink at his banquets. It is lamentable that the greater part of the Allemanists and of the Independents have likewise for so long eaten his bread and drunk his Champagne. It is lamentable that twenty deputies, three hundred delegates, nine hundred mandates lie in this man’s hands, as dupes or as accomplices.
But it is deplorable that the Petite République should have committed at least an error of two thousand and some hundreds of francs in the administration of a subscription. It is deplorable that it could have been demonstrated that the whole establishment of this newspaper rested, in the final reckoning, upon a disloyal traffic in overcoats, upon an atrocious exploitation of home labor, upon an implacable application of the sweating system.
This duel is without issue. Whether M. Edwards has or has not forty or sixty millions, he is rich enough to be unbreakable under the capitalist regime. He will always be able to pay for the copy of journalists. There will therefore always be journalists who bring him copy, for his money. This very day, in the same hour that the Petite République was publishing a copious census of his past infamies and his present combinations, he was taking on M. Jacques Dhur, M. Eugène Thébault, M. Louis Marsolleau, former editors of the Petite République.
One is still permitted to suppose that Jaurès reads the Petite République. He must therefore know how grave this campaign is. It dislocates the official socialist party in its economic foundations. It is without any doubt the gravest blow ever yet struck at the formal, the apparent socialist unity. It is permitted to strike such blows. But one ought at least to know what one is doing. It would be a culpable piece of childishness to imagine that congresses and committees weigh anything against this overflow of hatreds.
When a party has not had the courage to conform to the most elementary laws of moral hygiene, when it has renounced justice for favor, sincerity for complaisance, and truth for a factitious unity, when it abandons the reality of morals for the vanity of phrases, when it renounces its ideal for political manias, it is inevitable that pestilences should rot the organs.
Let us work:
The social revolution shall be moral, or it shall not be.
For the Russian Students
We urgently draw the attention of our university friends to the university campaign begun in Paris on behalf of the Russian students. Our friends have read and are reading in the dailies the details of the atrocious persecution carried on against our Russian comrades. We can give here only general information. A committee of young students has formed spontaneously in the Quarter. M. Louis Lapicque, maître de conférences at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris, has placed himself, with his youthful eagerness, entirely at their disposal.
We reproduce first the poster put up on the walls of the Quarter by the students. This poster has also been reduced to a leaflet. It will be noticed that the signatures are individual, personal. None of the regularly constituted groups in the Quarter has committed itself to the common demonstration. The Catholic group has no doubt refused for fear of the collectivists. The collectivist group has no doubt refused out of distrust of the Catholics. And so on. Whereas the names of the most distant men figure individually and personally on the poster. It will also be noticed that the signatures are purely academic.
For the Russian Students
APPEAL TO FRENCH STUDENTS
Comrades,
We invite you to come and bear witness at once to your sympathy for the Russian Students and to your attachment to academic liberties.
Following upon scholastic disorders, several hundred Students of Kiev have been — a juridical monstrosity — condemned to military service by a special commission upon which gendarmes and professors sat side by side, and sent into regiments. The Students of all Russia, indignant, have made common cause with their comrades and have ceased to attend the lectures.
It is the question of academic jurisdiction that is thus posed in its acutest form. The French professors, without distinction of political opinion, are agreed in declaring that this jurisdiction alone can assure the order and the dignity necessary to studies.
Events grow worse and cruelly bear out our masters: riots and acts of violence have intervened. We have not, as pupils of the University, to concern ourselves with these; but on the purely academic question which is the origin of the troubles, we have a duty to affirm our sympathy for our comrades of Russia.
APPEAL TO FRENCH STUDENTS
Science is international, the Universities of the whole world are bound together in solidarity; we wish to send to the Russian Students the testimony of our admiration for the courage with which they are defending the essential principles of all higher instruction.
Comrades, setting aside for a moment our political opinions, let us unite to express to the Russian Students our unanimous sentiment of fraternity.
SALLE D’ARRAS, 3, rue d’Arras, on Wednesday 27 March at half past eight in the evening
VOTING OF AN ADDRESS TO THE RUSSIAN COMRADES
THE STUDENT’S CARD will be rigorously required A fee of 0 franc 20 will be levied for expenses
Bellemère (Law), Benazet (Medicine), Bouchet (Letters), Bourgin (Chartes), Bouysson (Medicine), Crémieu (Letters), Delmas (Medicine), E. Delmas (Chartes), Desaguer (Law), Despetit (Agronomic Institute), Dieuzaide (Medicine), Fleurot (Medicine), Gaillard (Law), Gazanion (Law), Gilardoni (Sciences), Gompel (Sciences), Gouffier (Law), Hartmann (P. C. N.), V. Henri (Sciences), Hesse (Letters), Daniel Le Hire (Doctor of Law), Jean Longuet (Law), Ludovic Marchand (Letters), Maritain (Sciences), Edgard Milhaud (Agrégé of philosophy), Charles Péguy (Letters), de la Porte (Letters), Raimbault (Hautes Études), Marc Sangnier-Lachaud (Law), Terroine (Sciences), Téry (Agrégé of philosophy), Weiskopf (Letters).
The initiative committee having need to establish its permanent office in the heart of the Quarter, we are happy that it has accepted to establish it in our offices. A delegate sits every day of the week, Sunday excepted, from two o’clock to six o’clock, in our offices, at the disposal of the students.
No text has been prepared for the masters. Professors, maîtres de conférences, répétiteurs, lecturers, schoolmasters who wish to manifest their solidarity with the Russian students are to write personal letters to
Monsieur Louis Lapicque care of M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 16, rue de la Sorbonne, au second
Paris cinquième
They must specify whether or not they authorize M. Lapicque to make a public use of their letter.
Those of our subscribers who have occasion to write to M. André Bourgeois have only to insert in their letter a sheet addressed to M. Lapicque.
The initiative committee has prepared a text for the pupils, students of all schools and faculties. Printed sheets are circulated during the lectures and conferences and gather the signatures. These sheets are arranged thus:
COMMITTEE OF UNIVERSITY SOLIDARITY
In favor of the Russian Students (1)
Comrades of the Russian Universities,
It is with indignation that we learn of the oppressive measures of which you are the victims; of the monstrous constitution of those special commissions on which gendarmes and professors sit side by side; of the penal incorporation of several hundred of your number into the regiments of Siberia. — It is with a painful heaviness of heart that we think of all those who, expelled from the University or imprisoned, have abruptly lost all hope of a future.
In accord with our professors, we affirm that the absolute independence of academic jurisdiction can alone assure the order and the liberty in studies necessary to the progress of science and of thought. It is for the very existence of the Universities that you are fighting; professors and students are wholly with you in heart.
We suffer at not being able to fight at your side for the liberty of studies and of thought. But receive at least our fraternal encouragement; be sure of the admiration and of the ardent friendship of the Students of France.
NAMES — FACULTIES — NAMES — FACULTIES
(1) Permanent office, 16, rue de la Sorbonne, au second, from two o’clock to six o’clock, every day, except Sunday.
The students who wish to send in their names are to write to
Monsieur Jacques Maritain care of M. André Bourgeois, administrator of the cahiers, 16, rue de la Sorbonne, au second
Paris cinquième
Subscriptions for this special propaganda are to be addressed to
Monsieur Coulon care of M. André Bourgeois.
Those of our subscribers who have occasion to write to M. André Bourgeois have only to insert in their letter a sheet addressed to M. Maritain or to M. Coulon.
Apply at the same address for printed sheets which one will very usefully circulate in the provincial Faculties at the return from the Easter recess.
The printed sheets have received in Paris more than seven hundred signatures. They continue to circulate.
We cannot too strongly urge our friends to send in their signature.
M. Lapicque has been good enough to give us in writing some general information. He has brought up to date for the cahiers a double leaflet which had been printed and circulated at the first moment. Here is the new version, more complete, closed on 24 March:
THE CRISIS OF THE RUSSIAN UNIVERSITIES
The newspapers brought us, some weeks ago, news that was truly strange from the University of Kiev. Following upon university disorders, hundreds of students were being condemned to military service by a special commission on which gendarmes and professors sat side by side.
What is this penalty? What is this jurisdiction? It seems a nightmare.
The information was very incomplete, fairly incoherent; the newspapers inform us very badly about Russia.
In the laboratory of the Sorbonne where I work, I have for a comrade a Frenchman who was born in Russia and there passed all his youth. From speaking of these matters with him, I received from these events a stronger and more living impression than from the mere reading of a news item. I determined to know what was happening.
I have been able to find testimonies differing in their source and in their tendency; I have checked them against the official texts, notably against the report of the Ministry of Public Instruction published in the Messenger of the Government (in Russian). The facts are simple and clear; whether one takes them from one source or another, they are always the same; only the color in which they are presented varies.
Here they are as objectively as possible. The reader will easily follow, I hope, how minuscule events have drawn the Russian academic world into a grave and painful crisis whose outcome we cannot yet foresee.
I. — THE TROUBLES AT KIEV
The students of the University of Kiev having demonstrated against a professor whom they accused of ignorance, the general governor of the city intervened to dismiss this professor. The students, holding that an academic question ought to be settled by the academic authority, did not find that such a measure was of a nature to give them satisfaction.
In the meantime, an incident of another order came to increase the discontent: a student, in the company of a girl, and more or less drunk, had exchanged blows with a cab-driver: various newspapers of the city gave an inaccurate account of the incident, and added to it most disobliging reflections on the honorableness of students in general.
The students assembled, a forbidden thing; they wished “to oppose to the outrages a collective denial.” A police inspector entered the meeting, which dispersed at the first summons.
The repression of the offence was on this occasion extremely mild: only the chairman of the meeting and the two assessors had a few days of academic imprisonment inflicted on them, a wholly anodyne punishment. But as they wished the object of their meeting to be taken seriously and their grievances to reach the rector by some path other than a police report, those who had been punished had recourse to the tactic much employed in Russia under the name of passive resistance: they did not go to the prison and were excluded from the University for insubordination.
The students then organized a new meeting at the University itself, in the hope of inducing the rector to come to it. They went in at noon to a lecture-room which they found open. The room was rather small: some four hundred of them crowded into it and gave notice that they would wait for the rector until the moment when he should consent to hear them. At three o’clock, the usual hour of closing, the rector, without having given them any reply, left the University and warned the police. The University buildings were at once surrounded by a cordon of troops, gendarmes, Cossacks and foot-soldiers, with rifles loaded. The “rioters” continued to wait for their rector. They had lunched on a little bread and charcuterie; as they were stifling in the room, too small, with the double windows nailed and caulked, they broke a few panes and continued to wait.
It was the head of the gendarmerie, General Novitzky, who first lost patience.
At eight o’clock in the evening, he enters the room with about ten gendarmes, sabres drawn. The students persisting in asking for the rector, the general sends for him; the rector comes: “Monsieur the rector,” says the chairman of the meeting, “we have been waiting for you for eight hours; take the chair, we have requests to lay before you.” The general, after some discussion, summons the students to come out thirty by thirty so that their names may be taken; this order is executed without resistance.
The next day, the three hundred and ninety-two students whose presence had thus been ascertained were referred to a mixed commission, specially convoked, by the minister of Public Instruction (1).
This was to be the first application of the ukase of 29 July 1899.
II. — THE UKASE OF 29 JULY 1899
Here, textually translated, are articles 1 and 2 of this ukase, entitled: Provisional Regulation concerning the military service of pupils of higher schools excluded for collective disorders.
Article 1. — Pupils of higher schools, for the collective organization of disorders inside the schools or outside, or for the incitement to such disorders; for the organized abstention from scholastic exercises, or for the incitement to such abstention, shall be excluded from the schools and incorporated into regiments, even when they have an exemption acquired either by their family situation, or by their degree of instruction, or even when they have not yet reached the age of conscription, or again when they have drawn a number that exempts them from service.
Article 2. — To take cognizance of the offences enumerated in article 1, there shall be instituted at each higher school a council composed of the curator of the school district, as president; of the members of the academic council who hold disciplinary power; of the representatives of the ministries of War, of the Interior, and of Justice.
(1) I have been assured that the professors of Kiev had asked to be allowed to assemble in order to examine the affair and that permission had been refused them.
Upon its promulgation, the ministers of War and of Justice each, in what concerned him, entered the most express reservations as to the legality of this regulation.
As for the necessity of this exceptional jurisdiction, here is on what it was founded.
In the spring of 1899, grave troubles had occurred at the University of Petersburg; we had at that moment in Europe vague echoes of the scenes in the streets, of the charges of Cossacks striking the crowd with whips; the other Russian Universities, in solidarity, organized the strike, with obstruction, in short everything that the ukase calls abstention. There were mass arrests; a professor, who is an illustrious scholar, had suspended his course, having no more students; he received the formal order to resume it: “Very well,” he replied, “but where am I to give it? At the University, or in the prison?”
General Vanovsky was charged with an inquiry; his report concluded that the responsibility for the troubles fell upon the police, for its brutality, and upon the academic authorities, for their clumsiness. The general declared that the secret student societies, out of which it was desired to make a political danger, were merely mutual-aid societies, and that to prevent them from being secret, it was enough to authorize them. He added that, in these circumstances, the wisest as well as the most just policy was a wide indulgence.
But the measures had already been taken independently of this report; the ukase of 29 July had been promulgated.
III. — THE REPRESSION
This ukase had not yet been applied; it was generally regarded in Russia as bound to remain a mere scarecrow. The Minister of Public Instruction found it necessary to have recourse to it against the students of Kiev.
By telegram, the curator of the district received the order to convoke ex officio the council provided for by article 2. The members of the University designated to be part of it were the rector and the four deans of Kiev; the other members, besides the curator, were the general of gendarmerie Novitzky, a military prosecutor, and a civil prosecutor.
In the terms of the official report: “The commission held fifteen sittings from 11-24 December to 31 December-13 January, interrogated those who answered the summons, took cognizance of the written depositions of those who did not, and, after having judged the conduct of each participant, decided by a majority of voices (1): all the students having taken part in the meeting of [date] December are declared guilty and condemned to be excluded from the University and incorporated into the army for the following durations: 2 students for three years, 5 students for two years, all the others, including one student of another university, that is, 385, for one year; the judgment shall be submitted to the Minister of Public Instruction.”
(1) According to a piece of trustworthy information, the voices divided thus: for incorporation, the curator of the school district, the rector, two deans, and General Novitzky; against, two deans, the military prosecutor, and the civil prosecutor.
The minister confirmed the judgment for the 2 students of the first category and the 5 students of the second; moreover, for 176 students of the third; the 209 others had their penalty commuted.
It is said that eight of them, on arriving at the regiment, following the system of passive resistance, refused to take the oath of fidelity, were condemned to death, and that their penalty was then commuted to that of forced labor in perpetuity.
THE REPERCUSSIONS (1)
These condemnations had immediately an enormous resonance. Not so much for their severity (in Russia, they have on that head a different standard from ours) as on account of the monstrous jurisdiction from which they emanated.
The students of the other Universities made common cause with their comrades of Kiev. They held meetings, or else they simply ceased going to the lectures. New series of repressions; abstention itself falls under the blow of the ukase. At Petersburg, the ukase is applied a second time; with more moderation, with some shame, it seems, only twenty-eight condemnations.
After that, nothing more that is legal: in all the Universities, teaching ceases. Either the Universities are officially closed, or the lecture-halls are empty at the hour of lectures.
(1) From here on, my documentation is not so rigorous; we no longer have an official report as guide; we find a series of fragmentary items in the newspapers, already sufficient to reveal to us the gravity of the situation: and besides I have had communicated to me private letters, wholly worthy of confidence, which throw light on these items.
The demonstrations appear in the streets.
In many towns, the workmen join the students; factories go on strike, because, the workmen say, “we have need of the students and we do not wish the Universities to be killed.”
The police reply with charges of Cossacks and with mass arrests. At Petersburg, the crowd, demonstrators and onlookers alike, is literally crushed under the hoofs of the horses. Four students and one woman student are dead. Officers, who try to interpose, are themselves brutalized. Read the moving protest signed by forty-five Russian writers of every opinion, published in the Français of 22 March, in the Aurore and the Petite République of the 28th; listen to that moving cry of appeal of an indignation which can find utterance only through the French press, and to which the French press so pitilessly bargains its assistance. Forty-five writers, men and women, many of them illustrious, deliberately risk Siberia in order to make the world, and the tsar himself, hear the truth that will provoke justice. The Temps gives an analysis of five lines, with three or four names taken from the list of signatories, just enough to designate victims. The other newspapers are silent.
Cry, Russian intellectuals who are being slaughtered! No one will hear you: France has sunk too low!
No! The press and the government betray, by their venal silence, the cause of humanity, betray France herself, whose traditional honor it is to answer the appeal of justice. But France is worth more than what her press and her government would have one believe.
The French University, at least, has shown that it has a conscience.
I went to find the professors and the students, I set forth to them what is happening, and I asked them: What do you think of this jurisdiction for a system of higher instruction?
Moderate, socialist, or conservative — atheist, Catholic or Protestant — I found in each one the same revolt, the same outburst of saddened sympathy for the Russian professors and students.
Nearly eighty French professors (I have addressed myself as yet only to a part of them, and have had very few refusals) have written and signed their sentiment, to send it to their colleagues in Russia, with diverse nuances, with a reprobation expressed or implicit; all have said: “What is happening in Russia is abominable; a purely academic jurisdiction alone can assure at once the order and the dignity necessary to studies.”
The students have been no less unanimous: the Catholic circle is indignant just as is the Ligue démocratique des écoles. The groups could not bring themselves to sign a collective appeal as groups. Strange thing, there are prudishnesses, fears of compromise, stronger for a group label than for a man’s signature. But the individuals have loyally yielded to the prompting of their conscience. Marc Sangnier, of the Sillon, has signed the common poster beside Ludovic Marchand, of the Internationalist Revolutionary Socialists. The official and timorous Association générale des étudiants had, for its part, courageously, for once, decided in committee to take part in the meeting; only on the refusal of the extreme groups did it renounce appearing under its name; the president and several members of its committee have signed. On Wednesday, then, all the students will send their encouragement to the Russian comrades.
The ex-professor Milukov, an historian who counts at Paris many friends, had drawn up a petition addressed to the tsar in the terms of the purest loyalism, as well as of the most elevated patriotism; he has been arrested, and his petition has been seized before he could have it conveyed to his sovereign.
The Universities of Belgium and of Italy are stirred by the same movement. I have received this morning a protest signed by twenty-one professors of the University of Brussels. Students and professors are to come together in a meeting.
At Rome, Labriola and Enrico Ferri were to, today I believe, organize a meeting in the very courtyard of the University.
It is therefore a wide academic manifestation that is preparing and that will make burst forth the sympathy of the intellectuals of Western Europe for the rioters of Russia.
Violent as the movements may be over there, they are in effect academic movements. The Russian government, a part of the Russian government, will not recognize this; it denies free thought, because it fears it. Pierre Karpovitch has killed with a revolver shot the minister of Public Instruction, that Bogoliepov who had had the ukase taken in 1899 which he had had applied in January 1901. The Russian government has it given out that it is not a political crime. Karpovitch, who is a “petit bourgeois” and in no way a student, will be referred to the ordinary justice for murder. An affair without relation, as you see, to the academic crisis. In reality Karpovitch was a student two years ago; if he is no longer one, it is because he was excluded from the University, and, to avoid graver chastisements, had crossed the frontier. From abroad, where he was in safety, he returned to Russia, deliberately sacrificing his life.
Here is what seems to me to characterize the situation in Russia: at Moscow they paraded the red flag; on the flag was written: Abolition of the Ukase of
Paris, 24 March 1901
Louis Lapicque, Maître de conférences at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Paris
We read in the Petite République dated Sunday 24 March the text announced by Lapicque of the great Russian protest. We reproduce this text:
We the undersigned, Russian men of letters, deprived of the possibility of expressing freely our ideas on the needs of our poor fatherland, prevented by the censorship from speaking of what is going on under our eyes, from indicating an issue from the appalling situation in which our society is struggling, conscious of our duties towards the people, have recourse to our foreign confrères in order to put the civilized world in possession of the atrocities which are being committed among us.
On 17 March, on the place of Kazan at Petersburg, the police hurled itself upon a harmless and unarmed crowd of several thousand persons, men, women, and children, and without any provocation set itself to strike with a brutality and a ferocity without equal. The Cossacks, encircling the crowd and preventing it from moving about, charged without summons the compact mass, made up for the most part of onlookers, striking with their whips and literally crushing the unfortunate ones who fell under the pressure of the horses.
The police seized at hazard the people who fell under their hand and struck them without mercy, with fists or with sabres. Those of the public, even officers in uniform, who implored the cessation of the carnage, were brutalized or even arrested.
Such are the facts of which several of us were eye-witnesses. Analogous atrocities have been committed recently in other towns of Russia.
Full of terror and anguish before the future reserved for our country delivered up to the whips of Cossacks and the sabres of police-thugs;
Convinced that our indignation is shared by all our Russian confrères whose signatures we have not had time to obtain, by all intellectual Russian society, by all in whom the sentiments of dignity and of humanity have not yet been destroyed;
Convinced equally that our foreign confrères will not remain indifferent to what is happening among us,
We appeal to the press of the whole world to give the greatest possible publicity to the establishing of the lamentable facts of which we have been the witnesses.
Nicolas Annensky, publicist; Alexandre Bogdanovsky, man of letters; Arye Bogdanovitch, S. and R. Braguinsky, Alexandre Braoud, Vladimir Berenstam, advocate; Marie Watson, Pierre Weinberg, ex-professor at the University of Petersburg; G. Haline, Pierre Gay, art critic; Eugène Haxheiser, Vladimir Hessene, professor at the University of Petersburg; Gorky (Alexis Pechkov); Alexandre Goukovsky, Michel Yermolayev, director of the review La Vie; Alexandre Ivantchine-Pissarev, N. J. Kareyev, professor at the University of Petersburg; A. Kaminka, A. Kalmykov, A. Kornilov, N. Kotliarevsky, professor of history at the University of Petersburg; Vladimir Lessevitch, professor of philosophy at the University of Petersburg; Marie Letkov, woman of letters; D. Manine-Sibiriak, Paul Mokievsky, A. Mertvago, Nicolas Mikhailovsky, director of the review The Wealth of Russia; Benedict Miakotine, professor of history at the University of Petersburg; N. Moghilansky, Seraphine Panteleyev, Longuine Panteleyev, Grégoire Potanine, V. Possé, A. Petchekonov, V. Rosenberg, N. Roubakine, Nadine Roubakine, Marie Sleptzov, A. Yarotzky, professor of political economy at the University of Petersburg; P. Leshaft, professor of anatomy at the University of Petersburg.
We shall publish in a forthcoming cahier the petition of Milukov, the new Russian protest, the account of the meetings held in the Quarter.
POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Origins and Development of Democracy and of the Republic
1789 — 1804
A. AULARD Professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Paris
This book is the first in date which deserves the name of history of the French Revolution. Extract from the foreword:
In this political history of the French Revolution, I propose to show how the principles of the Declaration of Rights were, from 1789 to 1804, put to work in the institutions, or interpreted in speeches, in the press, in the acts of parties, in the various manifestations of public opinion. Two of these principles, that of the equality of rights and that of national sovereignty, were the most often invoked in the elaboration of the new political city. Historically, these are the essential principles of the Revolution. They were conceived and applied differently, according to the epochs. The narrative of these vicissitudes — there is the principal object of this book.
In other words, I wish to recount the political history of the Revolution from the point of view of the origins and the development of democracy and of the republic. The logical consequence of the principle of equality is democracy. The logical consequence of the principle of national sovereignty is the republic. These two consequences were not drawn straight away. In place of democracy, the men of 1789 set up a régime censitaire, bourgeois. In place of the republic, they organized a limited monarchy. It is only on 10 August 1792 that the French formed themselves into a democracy by the institution of universal suffrage. It is only on 22 September 1792 that, after having abolished the monarchy, they formed themselves into a republic. One may say that the republican form lasted until 1804, that is to say, until the epoch when the government of the republic was confided to an emperor. But democracy was suppressed in 1795, by the constitution of the Year III, or at least profoundly altered by a combination of universal suffrage and suffrage censitaire. They first asked the whole people to abdicate its rights in favor of a class, the bourgeois class, and this bourgeois regime is the period of the Directory. Then they asked the whole people to abdicate its rights in favor of one man, Napoléon Bonaparte: that is the plebiscitary republic, that is the period of the Consulate.
This history of democracy and of the republic during the Revolution thus divides itself naturally into four parts:
1° From 1789 to 1792, the origins of democracy and of the republic, that is to say, the formation of the democratic and republican parties under the régime censitaire, under the constitutional monarchy;
2° From 1792 to 1795, the democratic republic;
3° From 1795 to 1799, the bourgeois republic;
4° From 1799 to 1804, the plebiscitary republic.
These transformations of the French political city manifested themselves through a very great number of facts and in very complex circumstances.
The facts that have exercised an evident and direct influence on the political evolution — there are those that will have to be chosen in order to concentrate upon them the most light. The institutions, régime censitaire and monarchical regime, universal suffrage, constitution of 1793, revolutionary government, constitution of the Year III, constitution of the Year VIII; the movement of ideas which prepared, established, modified these institutions; the parties, their tendencies and their quarrels, the great currents of opinion, the revolutions of the public mind, the elections, the plebiscites, the struggle of the new spirit against the spirit of the past, of the new forces against the forces of the old regime, of the lay spirit against the clerical spirit, of the rational principle of free examination against the Catholic principle of authority — there is above all in what consisted the political life of France.
Other facts had an influence, but a less direct one: such are, for example, the battles, the diplomatic acts, the financial acts. It is indispensable not to be ignorant of them, but it is enough to know them broadly and in their results.
I have therefore set aside the military, diplomatic, financial history. I do not disguise from myself that this is an abstraction which may appear dangerous, and that I expose myself to the reproach of having falsified history in truncating it. But every historical undertaking is necessarily an abstraction: the retrospective effort of a single mind can embrace only a part of the immense and complex reality. It is already an abstraction to speak only of a period, and, within a period, to speak only of France, and, within the Revolution, to speak only of politics. There is, in history, no book which suffices to itself, which suffices the reader. Mine, like the others, supposes and requires other readings.
There is how I have chosen the facts. Here is in what order I have set them forth.
The chronological order imposed itself, and I have been able to follow it strictly throughout almost the whole of the first part of this work. There was, in fact, for the period from 1789 to 1792, only to set forth, as they are met with, the manifestations of the democratic and republican ideas, placing them within the framework of the constitutional monarchy and of the bourgeois regime. For the three other periods, democratic republic, bourgeois republic, plebiscitary republic, it would have been difficult to set forth at once, in the same chronological sequence, the institutions, the struggle of parties, the vicissitudes of public opinion. That would have been to put into the narrative the confusion which existed in reality, above all for the period of the democratic republic. I have thought it my duty to set forth in turn each of these manifestations of the same political life, as in several parallel chronological series. I know well that the vicissitudes of public opinion and those of the institutions are connected, are in a continual relation of reciprocal influence. So I have shown this connection, every time that it was necessary. I have tried to make it seen that these diverse phenomena were separated only in my book, and not in reality, that they were the aspects of one and the same evolution.
If one is not fully satisfied either with my method or with my plan, I hope that one will have at least, as regards my documentation, a security, which comes from the nature of my subject. I mean that one will not have to fear that it has been materially impossible for me to know all the essential sources. It is not the same for other subjects. The economic and social history of the Revolution, for example, is dispersed in so many sources that it is at present impossible, in the course of a man’s life, to approach them all or even to approach the principal ones. Whoever should wish to write, alone, all that history, could go deep into only a few parts of it and would arrive, on the whole, at no more than a superficial sketch, drawn at second or third hand. For political history, if one reduces it to the facts I have chosen, it is possible for one man, in some twenty years, to read the laws of the Revolution, the influential newspapers, the correspondences, the deliberations, the speeches, the official reports of elections, the biography of the personages who have played a role. Now, it is a little more than twenty years since I undertook this reading. I began, in 1879, by studying the speeches of the orators, and, for the last fifteen years, in my course at the Sorbonne, I have studied the institutions, the parties, the lives of the great individuals. I have thus had the material time to explore the sources of my subject. If the form of this book smacks of improvisation, my researches have been slow and I believe them to be complete on the whole. I do not think I have omitted any important source, nor advanced a single assertion which is not directly drawn from the sources.
As to the state of mind in which I have found myself in writing this book, I shall say only that I have wished, to the measure of my powers, to do the work of an historian, and not to plead a thesis. I have the ambition that my work may be considered as an example of the application of the historical method to the study of an epoch disfigured by passion and by legend.