IV. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
BY PROFESSOR ROBERT MATTESON JOHNSTON
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION concentrates within the narrow space of five years, from the 5th of May, 1789, to the 9th of Thermidor, 1794, all that man can conceive as most dramatic, repulsive, uplifting, terrifying, glorious, and disheartening. There is never a happy medium about it, nothing balanced or discriminating; everything is extreme, human emotion rising to the most intense collective utterance at the pangs of starvation, of murder, of oppression, of tyranny, at the joy of decisive action and of climbing the heights whence liberty and betterment can be seen streaking the horizon with hope. That is why the Revolution fascinates the ordinary reader more than perhaps any other period of history. It sets before him the bounds of the sublime and of the ignoble, of all that lies undeveloped in himself never, in all probability, to find expression.