ABSTRACT
The myth of the Revolution has a significance which is at once complementary and opposed to this: it fosters the expectation of a break with the normal trend of human affairs. By 1791 or 1792, the Revolution was felt by most contemporary thinkers, including the philosophes, to have been a catastrophe. The word revolution, in the current language of sociology, means the sudden and violent supplanting of one regime by another. Labour's achievement, in essence, is certainly not revolutionary in the sense in which this epithet can be applied to that of the Jacobins or of the Bolsheviks. The French Revolution belongs to the national heritage. Frenchmen have a weakness for the word revolution because they cherish the illusion of being associated with past glories. The French are not wretched enough to revolt against their lot. The national decline appears to them to be less attributable to men than to events.
