Bokelskere.no

If you go back to the birth of nations, if you come down to our own day, if you examine peoples in all possible conditions from the state of barbarism to the most advanced civilization, you always find war. From this primary cause, and from all the other connected causes, the effusion of human blood has never ceased in the world. Sometimes blood flows less abundantly over some larger area, sometimes it flows more abundantly in a more restricted area, but the flow remains nearly constant.

The king of Dahomey, in the African interior, was not so wrong unfortunately, when he recently told an Englishman, 'God made the world for war; all realms, great and small, have always practised it, although on different principles.' Unhappily, history proves that war is, in a certain sense, the habitual state of mankind, which is to say that human blood must flow without interruption somewhere or other on the globe, and that for every nation, peace is only a respite.

In a word, if there is no moral revolution in Europe, if the religious spirit is not reinforced in this part of the world, the social bond will dissolve. Nothing can be predicted, and everything must be expected, but if there is to be improvement in this matter, either France is called upon to produce it, or there is no analogy, no more induction, no more art of prediction. This consideration especially makes me think that the French Revolution is a great epoch and its consequences, in all kinds of ways, will be felt far beyond the time of it's explosion and the limits of its birthplace.

If it entered into God's designs to reveal His plans with respect to the French Revolution, we would read the chastisement to the French like the decree of a parlement. But what more would we know? Is the chastisement not obvious? Have we not seen France dishonoured by more than a hundred thousand murders? The entire soil of this beautiful realm covered with scaffolds? And this unfortunate land watered with the blood of its children through judicial massacres, while inhuman tyrants squandered still more abroad for the support of a cruel war waged for their own interests? Never has a bloodier despot played with men's lives with such insolence, and never has a passive people presented themselves more complaisantly to the butcher. Sword and fire, cold and thirst, privations, sufferings of every kind—nothing slakes their taste for punishment; all who are assigned must play their parts, and no disobedience will be seen until the judgement is accomplished.

In short, the more on examines the apparently most active personages in the revolution, the more one finds in them something passive and mechanical. We cannot repeat to often that men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men. They are right when they say It goes all alone. This phrase means that never has the Divinity shown itself so clearly in any human event. If the vilest instruments are employed, punishment is for the sake of regeneration.

It has been correctly pointed out that the French Revolution leads men more than men lead it. This observation is completely justified, and although it can be applied to all great revolutions more or less, it has never been more striking than it is in the present period. The very rascals who appear to lead the Revolution are involved only as simple instruments, and as soon as they aspire to dominate they fall ignobly. Those who established the Republic did it without wanting to and without knowing what they were doing. They were led to it by events; a prior design would not have succeeded. Robespierre, Collot or Barère never thought to establish the revolutionary government or the Reign of Terror; they were led to it imperceptibly by circumstances, and the like will never be seen again. These extremely mediocre men exercised over a guilty nation the most frightful despotism in history, and surely they were more surprised at their power than anyone else in the kingdom.

We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us. Nothing is more admirable in the universal order of things than the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely slaves, they act voluntarily and necessarily at the same time; they really do what they will, but without being able to disturb the general plans. Each of these beings occupies the centre of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the will of the Eternal Geometer, who can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature.