Is not history, with its perpetual alternatives of license and despotism, like a vicious circle? And do not the nations pass their time in producing webs of Penelope, whose bloody threads they weave and unweave again with tears? All governments, royalties, empires, republics, ought to be more modest. But all, profoundly forgetful of the lessons of the past, believe themselves immortal. All declare haughtily that they have closed forever the era of revolutions.
With the advent of the Republic a new calendar had been put in force. The equality of days and nights at the autumnal equinox opened the era of civil equality on September 22. "Who would have believed that this human geometry, so profoundly calculated, was written in the sand, and that in a few years no traces of it would remain? ... The heavens have continued to gravitate, and have brought back the equality of days and nights; but they have allowed the promised liberty and equality to perish, like meteors that vanish in empty space.... The _sans-culottes_ have not been able to make themselves popular among the starry peoples.... An ancient belief which the men of the Revolution had neglected through fear or through contempt was again met with; a spectre had appeared; a chilly breath, like that of Samuel, had made itself felt; and lo, the edifice so sagely constructed, and leaning on the worlds, has vanished away."[4]
There lies at the foundation of history a supreme sadness and melancholy. This never-ending series of illusions and deceptions, errors and afflictions, faults and crimes; this rage, and passion, and folly; so many efforts and fatigues, so many dangers, tortures, and tears, so much blood, such revolutions, catastrophies, cataclysms of every sort,--and all for what? Wretched humanity, rolling its stone of Sisyphus from age to age, inspires far more compassion than contempt. The painful reflections caused by the annals of all peoples are perhaps more sombre for the French Revolution than for any other period. Edgar Quinet justly laments over the inequality between the sacrifices of the victims and the results obtained by posterity. He affirms that in other histories one thing reconciles us to the fury of men, and that is the speedy fecundity of the blood they shed; for example, when one sees that of the martyrs flow, one also sees Christianity spread over the earth from the depth of the catacombs; while amongst us, the blood which streamed most abundantly and from such lofty sources, did not find soil equally well prepared. And the illustrious historian exclaims sadly: "The supreme consolation has been refused to our greatest dead; their blood has not been a seed of virtue and independence for their posterity. If they should reappear once more, they would feel themselves tortured again, and on a worse scaffold, by the denial of their descendants; they would hurl at us again the same adieu: 'O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!'"