First World War Centennial

II

THE EPOCH OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

THE fire which consumed feudalism was kindled in the French parliament, called together when the feudal monarchy, bankrupt by inefficiency and extravagance, had arrived at the end of its rope. The declaration of the rights of man, made in the August night of 1789, ranges with the Magna Charta and our Declaration of Independence as one of the greatest documents of human history.

It wiped out all privilege.

It demanded the freedom of the fullest in­dividual development for all human beings—liberté.

It established equal rights before the law for all—égalité.

The last demand, brotherhood of man, fraternité, was promptly forgotten for another century.

The great revolution was bloodless, the privi­leged classes voluntarily resigned their special rights.

This was the beginning of the great epoch which ushered in the new era of modern society. It almost was the end. Immediately all the enemies of progress, all the powers of darkness and reaction, sprang to arms against France, the promulgators and defender of the new idea. Internal enemies arose everywhere in France, even the royal court conspired with the coun­try's enemies. Europe's greatest military power, the Prussian army, invaded France in the north; the Austrian and German army in the south; rebellions flared up; never was a nation in so desperate condition. Even England, though already on the path toward the new era, joined the enemies of progress, and con­sistently throughout the entire epoch fought the battle of feudalism against the new era of individualism. It was a full generation later, when the unholy alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia had again welded the world into the fetters of feudalism, that England finally woke up and made the first breach in the chain by sinking the Turkish fleet at Navarino and so setting the Greeks free, while the new nation of the Western Hemisphere threw down the gant­let to feudalism by the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine.

But in the early days of the epoch it was France alone against the world. Then France showed that a nation, inspired by a single great and progressive idea, can defy the world and conquer. The guillotine cleared France from traitors and internal enemies. The Prussian army was ignominiously defeated in the Ar­gonnes, the Austrian army vanquished; in the Gironde the rebels hunted down; Toulon fell and was punished for making common cause with the country's enemies, and soon the French armies rolled over central Europe, bringing freedom and equal rights to the na­tions. Prussia and Austria were humiliated, and under the dictator Napoleon the lesson taught to the world that there is nothing sacred or superior in royalty, and kings and rulers were made and unmade at the whim of the country lawyer's son, the Emperor Napoleon; and some of Europe's most aristocratic rulers of to-day are the descendants of common folk, put on the throne by the country lawyer's son.

The Russian winter—not the Russian army—broke the spell of victory of France, and on the battle-field of Waterloo finally the Prussian army under Blucher saved the British army and turned defeat into victory, and France was conquered.

But not so the new idea. The defeat of France had become possible only by the adop­tion of the new idea of liberty and individual­ism, for which France had fought. After the defeat of Jena, when Prussia was at its lowest depths, Stein, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau had re­organized the Prussian nation, introduced the new ideas, and it was a new Prussia, the Prussia of the new era, which rose and defeated Na­poleon.

Thus, while France was defeated, the ideas which France had given to the world con­quered.

It is true, after Waterloo a temporary reac­tion set in. In unholy alliance, Austria, Rus­sia, and Prussia, together with the restored Bourbon France, tried to re-establish feudalism. But in 1830 France broke away, under the bourgeois king, Louis Philippe, and in 1848 the revolution swept over Europe and swept away the last remnant of feudalism. Except in Prussia. There the revolution was a draw, and

feudalism kept fighting on until the great par­liamentary fight in the early 60's, when year after year the Prussian parliament refused the Government all budget appropriations, while the monarch disregarded the constitution and continued to govern without parliament.

The controversy was finally compromised after the victorious war of Prussia against Aus­tria, and the formation of the North German Customs Union in 1866. The entrance of the other German states, in which capitalism was further advanced in power than in Prussia, in­duced Bismarck to make concessions, while on the other side the beginning danger of the social democracy made capitalism more inclined tow­ard compromise with the monarchical govern­ment.

It is important to realize this historical de­velopment as it laid the foundation of the or­ganization which brought about the present world's war.

While individualism, in the form of industrial capitalism, has never completely conquered in Prussian Germany, it has early conquered and ruled supremely in England.

The history of the world is the history of in­dustry, arts, and commerce, and war and revo­lution, conquest and defeat, are merely the out­ward appearances, the signs or mark-stones of the true history of the human race, which is made on the fields and farms, in the factories and workshops, in the business houses and shipping-offices.