Raw Haste
The French revolution failed because real liberty cannot be enforced overnight, or indeed enforced at all.
1793
King George III 1760-1820
The French revolution failed because real liberty cannot be enforced overnight, or indeed enforced at all.
1793
King George III 1760-1820
By 1793, William Pitt, Prime Minister for ten years, was thoroughly disillusioned with the French Revolution. The kind of liberty Pitt enjoyed at home, Sir Reginald Coupland reminds us, comes from peoples and not from governments, and takes centuries and not days to mature.
IT was difficult, indeed, for an unprejudiced Englishman and a passionate admirer of the British Constitution, not to sympathize with an effort, so largely inspired in origin by the example of British history and the doctrines of British writers, to free the French people from the bonds of feudal tyranny, to set limits to the absolute despotism of the Bourbon kings, and to establish a constitutional system of government.
But it was impossible for the French people, bound down for ages past under the despotism of the ancien regime to attain at one sudden stroke to the enjoyment of such political liberty as Englishmen enjoyed after centuries of gradual development and slow habituation to the practice of self-government.
The attempt, indeed, inspired by Utopian ideals, to compress the work of centuries into a hasty series of legislative measures was the fundamental cause of the tragedy which presently involved all Europe; to the inevitable breakdown of that attempt the disastrous change in the character and aims of the revolutionary movement was mainly due.
1. What is the author aiming to achieve in writing this?
2. Note any words, devices or turns of phrase that strike you. How do they help the author communicate his ideas more effectively?
3. What impression does this passage make on you? How might you put that impression into words?
Based on The English Critic (1939) by NL Clay, drawing on The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910, by J. E. Spingarn, Professor of Comparative Literature in Columbia University, USA.