at Taine set to work to
investigate the past {6} of his country, and particularly the great
Revolution on which all else appeared to be founded. Between 1875 and
1894 he produced his _Origines de la France Contemporaine_, which in a
sense supplanted all previous works on the Revolution. Behind it could
be plainly perceived a huge scaffolding of erudite labour, and the
working of an intellect of abnormal power; but what was not so
apparent, and is now only being slowly recognised, was that much of
this erudition was hasty and inspired by preconceived opinions, and
that Taine's genius was more philosophic than historic. Assuming the
validity of the impressions he had formed when witnessing the agony of
Paris in the spring of 1871, his history of the Revolution was a
powerful and brilliant vindication of those impressions. But it is
only the philosopher who forms his opinions before considering the
facts, the historian instinctively reverses the order of these
phenomena. As it was, Taine's great work made a tremendous impact on
the intellect of his generation, and nearly all that has been written
on the Revolution since his day is marked with his mark. His thesis
was that the Church and the State were the great institutions whereby
brute man had acquired his small share of justice and {7} reason, and
that to hack at the root of both State and Church was fatal; it could
only lead to the dictatorship of the soldier or to that of the mob. Of
these two evils the former appeared to him the less, while the latter
he could only think of in terms of folly and outrage. Taine's
conservatism was the reaction of opinion against the violence of the
Commune and the weak beginnings of the Third Republic, as Michelet's
liberalism had been its reaction against Orleanist and Bonapartist
middle class and military dictation.

Since Taine's great book, the influence of which is, in this year 1909,
only just beginning to fade, what have we had? Passing over von
Sybel's considerable and popular history of the Revolution, we have
Sorel's _L'Europe et la Revolution francaise_, more historical, more
balanced than Taine's work, clear in style and in arrangement, but on
the whole superficial in ideas and incorrect in details. Of far deeper
significance is the _Histoire Socialiste_ of Jean Jaures, of which the
title is too narrow; _Histoire du peuple_, or _Histoire des classes
ouvrieres_, would have more closely defined the scope of this
re