and political institutions, the writings of the Hebrews, by being misconceived and misapplied, have imposed fetters on the minds of those nations by which they have been acknowledged.

And so forth.

47

46

In religion, as in other aspects of culture, slow growth from within the folk was more to be desired than ready-made borrowings from neighbors. It seemed as though Herder in his numerous passages on religion 7 was forever seeking to reconcile faith with reason and Protestant Christianity with German Paganism and was thereby helping to fashion, probably unwittingly, the new synthesis of German nationalist religion which was to find mystical expression in the nineteenth century in the music of Wagner and the fiction of Chamberlain.

Above all these special contributions to German nationalism was Herder's vindication of the inde feasible right of Germany (and of every other nation) to its own life. His unique contribution along this line needs no further amplication. Suffice it to say that the arresting phrases which flowed from his pen year by year from 1764 to 1803 took lodgment in the public mind and popular heart of Germany and helped to nourish therein the inclination toward unity and independence which were brought to sudden fruition by the aggressions of Napoleon. Prussian regeneration and the German War of Liberation are almost unthinkable without the preparatory career of Johann Gottfried von Herder.

V.

Herder was an eighteenth-century humanitarian and liberal. The cultural nationalism which he espoused was not an end in itself; it was a means of understanding and appreciating humanity as a whole. Nor did it involve any stern obligation of "manifest destiny" in bearing the "white man's burden" and exercising sovereign sway over "lesser breeds". The nineteenth-century nationalism of which Herder was the prophet was the liberal self-determining nationalism of a Mazzini, a John Stuart Mill, a Francis Lieber, and a Laveleye; it was equally good and rightful for all races and all continents. Most emphatically it was not the imperial nationalism of Treitschke, Homer Lea, Roosevelt, and Mussolini.

46 Sämmtliche Werke, XIV. 64.

47 Cf. also, in addition to the above passages quoted from the Ideen, his sermons, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. XXXI.; his Christliche Schriften, vols. XIX., XX.; his Vom Geist der Ebräischen Pocsie, vols. XI., XII.; and the nine articles in vol. VII., passim.

Herder inveighs frequently against the subjection of one nationality to another and especially against the incorporation of diverse nationalities in a despotic empire. He detests imperialism.

The most natural state [he asserts] is one people with one national character. This it retains for thousands of years, and this is most naturally formed when it is the object of its native princes; for a people is as much a natural plant as a family, only with more branches. Nothing therefore appears so directly opposed to the end of government as the unnatural enlargement of states, the wild mixture of various breeds and nations under one sceptre. A human sceptre is far too weak and slender for such incongruous parts to be engrafted upon it: glued together indeed they may be into a fragile instrument, termed an instrument of state, but destitute of inner life and of sympathy among the parts. Empires of this kind, which render the name of fathers of their country hardly applicable to the best of monarchs, appear in history like that symbol of monarchy in the vision of the prophet, where the lion's head, the dragon's tail, the eagle's wing, and the paws of the bear were joined in one unpatriotic figure of a state. Such monstrosities are pieced together like the Trojan horse in order to guaranty one another's immortality, although, being destitute of national character, there is no life in them, and nothing but the curse of fate can condemn to immortality such a forced union. For the very statecraft which framed them is also that which plays with men and peoples as with inanimate objects. But history sufficiently shows that such instruments of human pride are formed of clay, and, like all clay, will dissolve or crumble into bits.48

Herder is particularly vehement against European imperialism overseas. He has a regard as tender for the national character and national culture and national rights of Chinese and Hindus as for those of European peoples. Nature and Providence have created nationalities, he maintains, for the express purpose of rendering despotic subjugation more difficult and of preventing

all the four quarters of the globe from being crammed into the belly of a wooden horse. No Nimrod has yet been able to drive all the inhabitants of the wide world into one park for himself and his successors; and though it has been for centuries the object of united Europe to erect herself into a despot, compelling all the nations of the earth to be happy in her way, this happiness-dispensing deity is yet far from having obtained her end. . . . Ye men of all parts of the world who have perished in the lapse of aeons, ye have not lived and enriched the earth with your ashes that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European civilization.49

He even hints that nationalist revolutions and forcible opposition to foreign domination may be praiseworthy and conducive to human progress.

Only amid storms can the noble plant flourish; only by opposing struggles against false pretensions can the sweet labors of man be victorious. Nay, 48 Ibid., XIII. 384-385. Cf. ibid., XIV. 139-140, 185-186, etc.

49 Ibid., XIII. 341-342.

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXXII.-49.

when men often appear to sink under their honest purposes, it is only in appearance so. In a subsequent period the seed germinates more beautifully from the ashes of the good, and when irrigated with blood seldom fails to shoot up into an unfading flower. I am no longer misled, therefore, by the phenomenon of revolutions: it is as necessary to our species, as the waves to the stream, that it become not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity blooms in continually renovated youth and is regenerated as it proceeds, in families, in generations, and in nations.50

Herder might well be adopted as patronal saint by the patriots of all "oppressed" or "subject " nationalities throughout the world to-day. His gospel is theirs, as it was the gospel of exploited Germans at the beginning of the nineteenth century. And his hope is the hope of liberal nationalists the world over. He is very optimistic -and so are they. He is sure that despotism and war alike will cease with the triumph of the principle of nationality. Each people, with its folk-character, will then enter the domain of the ideal, conscious of the dignity and worth of its peculiar heritage, loving its past, working with informed ability toward the future consummation of the promise of the past, respecting the similar-dissimilar achievements of other peoples, reaching out toward the goal of a fulfilled humanity, the common goal toward which all nations will have come struggling up each in its own way. It is inconceivable to Herder that one free nation can or will wage war against another free nation.51

And yet . . . and yet Herder, like the gentle dew from Heaven, has fallen upon both the just and the unjust. After Francis Lieber there was Treitschke; after J. S. Mill, Homer Lea; after Laveleye, Barrès; after Mazzini, Mussolini. Only the nineteenth century separates Herder from the Great World War of the Nations.

50 Sämmtliche Werke, XIII. 353.

CARLTON J. H. HAYES.

51 Ibid., XIII. 155, 160, 322; XIV. 221-225, 242-243.

REVOLUTIONARY SYMBOLISM IN THE JACOBIN CLUBS

THERE was used in parts of France during the more excited days. of the Revolution a republican sign of the cross, in the name of "Marat, Lepelletier, la liberté ou la mort ". As the Jacobins commonly lacked not only a sense of humor, but even a feeling for its moral equivalent, irony, it may be assumed that the users, and even the inventor, of this extraordinary device were at the moment wholly in earnest. The parallel between the French Revolution and movements more purely, or at least more formally, religious has of course been too obvious to escape historians. Before De Tocqueville and Taine, however, the parallel had been drawn. As early as the autumn of 1790, an unknown agent of the state of Bern wrote to his government: "This is not an ordinary revolution. It is a kind of religion which has its fanatics and its apostles." 2

3

The subject, though not new, is inexhaustible. Not only is the interpretation of the Jacobin religion a problem in which differences of opinion are always to be expected, but the industry of French local historians is continually producing a new supply of unassimilated facts. MM. Aulard, Mathiez, and Dommanget have written excellent accounts of the development of the various revolutionary cults. With a somewhat more evident philosophical bias, De Tocqueville, Taine, and A. Cochin have sought to criticize the workings of the Jacobin conscience. The religious elements in the ordinary proceedings of the sociétés des amis de la constitution and their successors have not however been so closely studied. The members of these societies took part in public manifestations of the revolutionary cults, those of la patrie, of Reason, of the Supreme Being; but very early in their regular club meetings they began to develop a ritual of their own, a ritual at least as suggestive of religious practices as of parliamentary procedure. A study from this point of view of some of the

1 Dommanget, La Déchristianisation à Beauvais (1922), pt. 2, p. 106.

2 Letter of Oct. 22, 1790, in State Archives of Bern, quoted by A. Stern, Revue Historique, March, 1889, p. 313 and n.

3 Aulard, Le Culte de la Raison et le Culte de l'Être Suprême (1892); Mathiez, Les Origines des Cultes Révolutionnaires (1904); La Théophilanthropie et le Culte Décadaire (1904); Dommanget, La Déchristianisation à Beauvais.

4 De Tocqueville, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856); Taine, Origines de la France Contemporaine (1876-1894); Cochin, Les Sociétés de Pensée et la Démocratie: Études d'Histoire Révolutionnaire (1921).

surviving minutes of these clubs ought therefore to be not unfruitful.5

The symbolism employed by the clubs must, of course, be understood as one aspect of the religious enthusiasm that marked the attempts to spread the revolutionary cults throughout France; and, although it is difficult to compress such manifestations into a summary account, the activities of the clubs will lose most of their meaning if they can not be thus referred to the general phenomena of revolutionary religious symbolism. Of the revolutionary cults, the first in time as in importance may be called simply that of la patrie. With the fall of the Bastille it found its first symbol in the tricolor cockade. Then autels de la patrie, simple stone blocks, suitably inscribed with moral aphorisms of the Enlightenment, were erected on village greens and in front of city halls. Trees of liberty-and here the revolutionists adopted for themselves the immemorial custom of the maypole-were planted by municipalities and patriotic societies. As the Revolution developed, party symbols like the Mountain, symbols of emergency like the ail de surveillance, and symbols more directly borrowed from Christianity, like the martyred trinity, Marat, Lepelletier, and Chalier, were introduced. People were gathered together for ceremonies built up around these symbols. The "federations" of July 14, 1790, at Paris and in the provinces were probably the most sincere and the most universally shared of such moments of collective emotion. But there were also fraternal meals held in the open air, where the youths served simple dishes to their elders, assembled with no distinction of rank or wealth. More obvious imitations of Christian practice began to appear. There were civic marriages, civic baptisms, civic burials. Revolutionary songs were written, and the songs became hymns. The Declaration of the Rights of Man took on the authority of scripture.

5 The minutes of most of these societies have been lost, and the remaining ones are often incomplete. This is true despite the seizure of the papers of the clubs ordered by the government in the year III. The documents were after all not quite official, and they were certainly among the most incriminating records of the Terror; many of the government agents themselves had a Jacobin past to efface. Yet enough of the documents have survived to form a very adequate base for a judgment of the ideas and practices common to the clubs. This paper is founded upon a study of the proceedings, in whole or in part, of some sixty clubs representing all the regional divisions of France.

The best brief summary of this symbolism is in Mathiez, Les Origines des Cultes Révolutionnaires, pp. 29–62.

7 A festival in honor of Equality held in Commune Affranchie (Lyons) in the spring of 1794 will illustrate this symbolism. In the long procession of officials, national guardsmen, and members of patriotic societies there were carried a carpenter's level in the name of equality, busts of the great Frenchmen, Marat,