Note 489 — Chapter III

Robison does not wholly miss the true point in his survey of the backgrounds of the French Revolution. He points out numerous “cooperating causes” which served to make the Revolution inevitable. “Perhaps there never was a nation where all these cooperating causes had acquired greater strength than in France. Oppressions of all kinds were at a height. The luxuries of life were enjoyed exclusively by the upper classes, and this in the highest degree of refinement; so that the desires of the rest were whetted to the utmost. Even religion appeared in an unwelcome form, and seemed chiefly calculated for procuring establishments for the younger sons of insolent and useless nobility. For numbers of men of letters were excluded, by their birth, from all hopes of advancement to the higher stations in the church. These men frequently vented their discontents by secretly joining the laics in their bitter satires on such in the higher orders of the clergy, as had scandalously departed from the purity and simplicity of manners which Christianity enjoins. Such examples were not unfrequent, and none was spared in those bitter invectives…. The faith of the nation was shaken; and when, in a few instances, a worthy Curé uttered the small still voice of true religion, it was not heard amidst the general noise of satire and reproach. The misconduct of administration, and the abuse of the public treasures, were every day growing more impudent and glaring, and exposed the government to continual criticism.” (Robison, pp. 60 et seq. Cf. ibid., pp. 362 et seq.) These “cooperating causes” receive little emphasis, however, in Robison’s zealous effort to trace the revolutionary spirit to its lair in the Masonic lodges of France.