The Revolutionary Tradition

To the historians of the nineteenth century two words provided the key to human history. They were “continuity” and “development.” These Romantic-conservatives saw revolution as wrong, not because they found it intellectually and ethically antithetic but because all revolution and particularly the French Revolution broke the ties of continuity which bound past, present and future into one organic whole. Lord Acton rhetorically inquired, “What was the revolution?” His answer was clear: “The defeat of History, History dethroned.” Little wonder that the historians of the nineteenth century tended to emphasize the growth and development of tradition at the expense of novelty, innovation and revolution.

But as the century wore on the searchers for historical continuity turned to an examination of the principles of the revolution itself. They discovered that these principles too possessed a continuity and represented a tradition. As an older and wiser Lord Acton put it, “… the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that this [the French Revolution] was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and indirectly, by process of development and process of reaction, an impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor of civilization than ever before, and a movement began in the world of minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of learning.”

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Stephen Tonsor

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To the historians of the nineteenth century two words provided the key to human history. They were “continuity” and “development.” These Romantic-conservatives saw revolution as wrong, not because they found it intellectually and ethically antithetic but because all revolution and particularly the French Revolution broke the ties of continuity which bound past, present and future into one organic whole. Lord Acton rhetorically inquired, “What was the revolution?” His answer was clear: “The defeat of History, History dethroned.” Little wonder that the historians of the nineteenth century tended to emphasize the growth and development of tradition at the expense of novelty, innovation and revolution.

But as the century wore on the searchers for historical continuity turned to an examination of the principles of the revolution itself. They discovered that these principles too possessed a continuity and represented a tradition. As an older and wiser Lord Acton put it, “… the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that this [the French Revolution] was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and indirectly, by process of development and process of reaction, an impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor of civilization than ever before, and a movement began in the world of minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of learning.”