Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The French Revolution, Vol. 2 of 2
But human beings are seldom logical as individuals, and never logical in the mass. The Parisian mob did not reason closely when it attacked the Bastille. The world did not discriminate finely between cause and effect when it heard of the fall of the Bastille. The fact that the Bastille had long ceased to be an evil prison is of very little moment compared with the fact that an insurgent mob chose to regard it as an evil prison. The innocence of its old age may be established beyond dispute, but it is no less beyond dispute that in 1789 a large number of people chose to regard it as a symbol of the old order which they hated, chose to re gard its overthrow as one of the strongest as it was one of the earliest blows struck at the supremacy of the old order. When Fox described the taking of the Bastille as the greatest event in history, he did not merely exult over the easy capture of an antiquated stronghold: he would not have altered his judgment even if he had been assured that it had long been disused to iniquity, that its torture-chambers and its dungeons were things of the past, and that the dreaded institution of the Let tres de Cachet would soon have existed only in memory. The taking of the Bastille afi'mded the people of Paris the first proof of the weakness of authority and the strength of the mob. Whether the obtaining of that proof be rejoiced at or bewailed over, the fact that it was so obtained makes the day's work of July 14 inevi tably and rightly momentous.
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