18 Juillet 1789 in Histoire Parlementaire, ii. 137.) Subscriptions are opened; Lists are formed, more accurate than Elie’s; harangues are delivered.  A Body of Bastille Heroes, tolerably complete, did get together;—­comparable to the Argonauts; hoping to endure like them.  But in little more than a year, the whirlpool of things threw them asunder again, and they sank.  So many highest superlatives achieved by man are followed by new higher; and dwindle into comparatives and positives!  The Siege of the Bastille, weighed with which, in the Historical balance, most other sieges, including that of Troy Town, are gossamer, cost, as we find, in killed and mortally wounded, on the part of the Besiegers, some Eighty-three persons:  on the part of the Besieged, after all that straw-burning, fire-pumping, and deluge of musketry, One poor solitary invalid, shot stone-dead (roide-mort) on the battlements; (Dusaulx:  Prise de la Bastille, p. 447, &c.) The Bastille Fortress, like the City of Jericho, was overturned by miraculous sound.

BOOK VI.

CONSOLIDATION

Chapter 1.6.I.

Make the Constitution.

Here perhaps is the place to fix, a little more precisely, what these two words, French Revolution, shall mean; for, strictly considered, they may have as many meanings as there are speakers of them.  All things are in revolution; in change from moment to moment, which becomes sensible from epoch to epoch:  in this Time-World of ours there is properly nothing else but revolution and mutation, and even nothing else conceivable.  Revolution, you answer, means speedier change.  Whereupon one has still to ask:  How speedy?  At what degree of speed; in what particular points of this variable course, which varies in velocity, but can never stop till Time itself stops, does revolution begin and end; cease to be ordinary mutation, and again become such?  It is a thing that will depend on definition more or less arbitrary.

For ourselves we answer that French Revolution means here the open violent Rebellion, and Victory, of disimprisoned Anarchy against corrupt worn-out Authority:  how Anarchy breaks prison; bursts up from the infinite Deep, and rages uncontrollable, immeasurable, enveloping a world; in phasis after phasis of fever-frenzy;—­’till the frenzy burning itself out, and what elements of new Order it held (since all Force holds such) developing themselves, the Uncontrollable be got, if not reimprisoned, yet harnessed, and its mad forces made to work towards their object as sane regulated ones.  For as Hierarchies and Dynasties of all kinds, Theocracies, Aristocracies, Autocracies, Strumpetocracies, have ruled over the world; so it was appointed, in the decrees of Providence, that this same Victorious Anarchy, Jacobinism, Sansculottism, French Revolution, Horrors of French Revolution, or what else mortals name it, should have its turn.  The ‘destructive wrath’ of Sansculottism:  this is what we speak, having unhappily no voice for singing.