Although in its beginnings a religious or political revolution
may very well be supported by rational elements, it is developed
only by the aid of mystic and affective elements which are
absolutely foreign to reason.

The historians who have judged the events of the French
Revolution in the name of rational logic could not comprehend
them, since this form of logic did not dictate them. As the
actors of these events themselves understood them but ill, we
shall not be far from the truth in saying that our
Revolution was a phenomenon equally misunderstood by those
who caused it and by those who have described it. At no period
of history did men so little grasp the present, so greatly ignore
the past, and so poorly divine the future.


. . . The power of the Revolution did not reside in the
principles--which for that matter were anything but novel--which
it sought to propagate, nor in the institutions which it sought
to found. The people cares very little for institutions and even
less for doctrines. That the Revolution was potent indeed, that
it made France accept the violence, the murders, the ruin and the
horror of a frightful civil war, that finally it defended itself
victoriously against a Europe in arms, was due to the fact that
it had founded not a new system of government but a new religion.

Now history shows us how irresistible is the might of a strong
belief. Invincible Rome herself had to bow before the armies of
nomad shepherds illuminated by the faith of Mahommed. For the