Elements drawn from all classes and conditions belong to it instinctively — uprooted peasantry, literates, ruined business men, and above all (as the age of Catiline shows with terrifying clarity) derailed nobles. Their power is far in excess of their numbers, for they are always on the spot, always on hand at the big decisions, ready for anything, devoid of all respect for orderliness, even the orderliness of a revolutionary party. It is from them that events acquire the destructive force which distinguishes the French Revolution from the English, and the Second Tyrannis from the First. The bourgeoisie looks at these masses with real uneasiness, defensively, and seeks to separate itself from them — it was to a defensive act of this category, the 13th Vendémiaire, that Napoleon owed his rise.[1] But in the pressure of facts the separating frontier cannot be drawn; wherever the bourgeoisie throws into the scale against the older orders its feeble weight of aggressiveness — feeble in relative numbers and feeble because its inner cohesion is risked at every moment — this mass has forced itself into their ranks, pushed to the front, imparted most of the drive that wins the victory, and very often managed to secure the conquered position for itself — not seldom with the continued idealistic support of the educated who are intellectually captivated, or the material backing of the money powers, which seek to divert the danger from themselves on to the nobility and the clergy.
There is another aspect, too, under which this epoch has its importance — in it for the first time abstract truths seek to intervene in the world of facts. The capital cities have become so great, and urban man so superior and influential over the waking-consciousness of the whole Culture (this influence is what we call Public Opinion) that the powers of the blood and the tradition inherent in the blood are shaken in their hitherto unassailable position. For it must be remembered that the Baroque State and the absolute Polis in their final development of form are thoroughly living expressions of a breed, and that history, so far as it accomplishes itself in these forms, possesses the full pulse of that breed. Any theory of the State that may be fashioned here is one that is deduced from the facts, that bows to the greatness of the facts. The idea of the State had finally mastered the blood of the first Estate, and put it wholly and without reserve at the State's service. "Absolute" means that the great being-stream is as a unit in form, possesses one kind of pulse and instinct, whether the manifestations of that pulse be diplomatic or strategic flair, dignity of moral and manners, or fastidious taste in arts and thoughts.
As the contradictory to this grand fact, now, Rationalism appears and spreads, that which has been described above[2] as the community of waking-consciousness in the educated, whose religion is criticism and whose numina are
- ↑ Hence also the exclusive bourgeois character of the National Guard in France from 1815 to 1851, the period between two phases of popular Tyrannis. In the coup d'état by which Napoleon III seized the throne, Paris was filled with regular troops, and the National Guard was forbidden to assemble on pain of death. — Tr.
- ↑ Pp. 97, and 305.
