Should the time for leisurely research ever return to me, I will prove in the most tiresomely fundamental manner that it was not India, but Egypt which originated that system of castes which has for two thousand years disguised itself in the garb of every country, and has deceived every age in its own language, which is now perhaps dead, yet which, counterfeiting the appearance of life, wanders about among us evil-eyed and mischief-making, poisoning our blooming life with its corpse vapour--yes, like a vampire of the Middle Ages, sucking the blood and the light from the heart of nations. From the mud of the Nile sprang not merely crocodiles which well could weep, but also priests who understand it far better, and that privileged hereditary race of warriors, who in their lust of murder and ravenous appetites far surpass any crocodiles.
Two deeply-thinking men of the German nation discovered the soundest counter-charm to the worst of all Egyptian plagues, and by the black art--by gunpowder and the art of printing--they broke the force of that spiritual and worldly hierarchy which had formed itself from the union of the priesthood and the warrior caste--that is to say, from the so-called Catholic Church, and from the feudal nobility, which enslaved all Europe, body and spirit. The printing-press burst asunder the dogma-structure in which the archpriest of Rome had imprisoned souls, and Northern Europe again breathed free, delivered from the nightmare of that clergy which had indeed abandoned the form of Egyptian inheritance of rank, but which remained all the truer to the Egyptian priestly spirit, since it presented itself, with greater sternness and asperity, as a corporation of old bachelors, continued not by natural propagation, but unnaturally by a Mameluke system of recruiting. In like manner we see how the warlike caste has lost its power since the old routine of the business is worth nothing in the modern methods of war. For the strongest castles are now thrown down by the trumpet-tones of the cannon as of old the walls of Jericho; the iron harness of the knight is no better protection against the leaden rain than the linen blouse of the peasant; powder makes men equal; a citizen's musket goes off just as well as a nobleman's--the people rise.
The earlier efforts of which we read in the history of the Lombard and Tuscan republics, of the Spanish communes, and of the free cities in Germany and other countries, do not deserve the honour of being classed as movements on the part of the people; they were not efforts to attain liberty, but merely liberties; not battles for right, but for municipal rights; corporations fought for privileges, and all remained fixed in the bonds of gilds and trades unions.
Not until the days of the Reformation did the battle assume general and spiritual proportions, and then liberty was demanded, not as an imported, but as an aboriginal right; not as inherited, but as inborn. Principles were brought forward instead of old parchments; and the peasants in Germany, and the Puritans in England, fell back on the gospel whose texts then were of as high authority as the reason, even higher, since they were regarded as the revealed reason of God. There it stood legibly written that men are of equal birth, that the pride which exalts itself will be damned, that wealth is a sin, and that the poor are summoned to enjoyment in the beautiful garden of God, the common Father.
With the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, the peasants swept over South Germany, and announced to the insolent burghers of high-towered Nuremberg, that in future no house should be left standing which was not a peasant's house. So truly and so deeply had they comprehended equality. Even at the present day in Franconia and in Suabia we see traces of this doctrine of equality, and a shuddering reverence of the Holy Spirit creeps over the wanderer when he sees in the moonshine the dark ruins of the days of the Peasant's War. It is well for him, who, in sober, waking mood, sees naught besides; but if one is a "Sunday child"--and every one familiar with history is that--he will also see the high hunt in which the German nobility, the rudest and sternest in the world, pursued their victims. He will see how unarmed men were slaughtered by thousands: racked, speared, and martyred; and from the waving corn-fields one will see the bloody peasant-heads nodding mysteriously, and above one hears a terrible lark whistling, piping revenge, like the Piper of Helfenstein.
The brothers in England and Scotland were rather more fortunate; their defeat was not so disgraceful and so unproductive, and even now we see there the results of their rule. But they did not obtain a firm foundation for their principles, the dainty cavaliers ruled again just as before, and amused themselves with merry tales of the stiff old Roundheads, which a friendly bard had written so prettily to entertain their leisure hours. No social overthrow took place in Great Britain, the framework of civil and political institutions remained undisturbed, the tyranny of castes and of corporations has remained there till the present day, and though drunken with the light and warmth of modern civilisation, England is still congealed in a mediæval condition, or rather in the condition of a fashionable Middle Age. The concessions which have there been made to liberal ideas, have been with difficulty wrested from this mediæval rigidity, and all modern improvements have there proceeded, not from a principle, but from actual necessity, and they all bear the curse of that halfness system which inevitably makes necessary new exertion and new conflicts to the death, with all their attendant dangers. The religious reformation in England is consequently but half completed, and one finds himself much worse off between the four bare prison walls of the Episcopal Anglican Church than in the large, beautifully-painted, and softly-cushioned spiritual dungeon of Catholicism. Nor has the political reformation succeeded much better; popular representation is in England as faulty as possible, and if ranks are no longer distinguished by their coats, they are at least divided by differences in legal standing, patronage, rights of court presentation, prerogatives, customary privileges, and similar misfortunes; and if the rights of person and property depend no longer upon aristocratic caprice, but upon laws, still these laws are nothing but another sort of teeth with which the aristocratic brood seizes its prey, and another sort of daggers wherewith it assassinates people. For in reality, no tyrant upon the Continent squeezes, by his own arbitrary will, so many taxes out of his subjects as the English people are obliged to pay by law; and no tyrant was ever so cruel as England's Criminal Law, which daily commits murder for the amount of one shilling, and that with the coldest formality. Although many improvements have recently been made in this melancholy state of affairs in England; although limits have been placed to temporal and clerical avarice, and though the great falsehood of a popular representation is, to a certain degree, occasionally modified by transferring the perverted electoral voice of a rotten borough to a great manufacturing town; and although the harshest intolerance is here and there softened by giving certain rights to other sects, still it is all a miserable patching up which cannot last long, and the stupidest tailor in England can foresee that, sooner or later, the old garment of state will be rent asunder into wretched rags.
"No man seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment; else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred; but new wine must be put into new bottles."
The deepest truth blooms only out of the deepest love, and hence comes the harmony of the views of the elder Preacher in the Mount, who spoke against the aristocracy of Jerusalem; and those later preachers of the mountain, who, from the summit of the Convention in Paris, preached a tri-coloured gospel, according to which, not merely the form of the State, but all social life should be, not patched, but formed anew, newly founded; yes, born again.
I speak of the French Revolution, that epoch of the world in which the doctrines of freedom and of equality rose so triumphantly from those universal sources of knowledge which we call reason, and which must, as an unceasing revelation which repeats itself in every human head, and founds a distinct branch of knowledge, be far preferable to that transmitted revelation which makes itself known only in a few elect, and which, by the multitude, can only be
believed. The privileged aristocracy, the caste-system with their peculiar rights, were never able to combat this last-mentioned sort of revelation (which is itself of an aristocratic nature) so safely and surely as reason, which is democratic by nature, now does. The history of the Revolution is the military history of this strife, in which we have all taken a greater or lesser part; it is the death-struggle with Egyptianism.
Though the swords of the enemies grow duller day by day, and though we have already conquered the best positions, still we cannot raise the song of victory until the work is perfected. We can only during the night, when there are armistices, go forth with the lantern on the field of death to bury the dead. Little avails the short burial service! Calumny, the vile insolent spectre, sits upon the noblest graves.
Oh, that the battle were only with those hereditary foes of truth who so treacherously poison the good name of their enemies, and who even humiliated that first Preacher of the Mount, the purest hero of freedom; for as they could no longer deny that he was the greatest of men, they made of him the least of gods. He who fights with priests may make up his mind to have his poor good name torn and befouled by the most infamous lies and the most cutting slanders. But as those flags which are most rent by shot, or blackened by powder-smoke, are more highly honoured than the whitest and soundest recruiting banners, and as they are at last laid up as national relics in cathedrals, so at some future day the names of our heroes, the more they are torn and blackened, will be all the more enthusiastically honoured in the holy St. Geneviève of Freedom.
The Revolution itself has been slandered, like its heroes, and represented as a terror to princes, and as a popular scare-crow, in libels of every description. All the so-called "horrors of the Revolution" have been learned by heart by children in the schools, and at one time nothing was seen in the public fairs but harshly-coloured pictures of the guillotine. It cannot be denied that this machine, which was invented by a French physician, a great world orthopædist, Monsieur Guillotin, and with which stupid heads are easily separated from evil hearts, this wholesome machine has indeed been applied rather frequently, but still only in incurable diseases, in such cases, for example, as treachery, falsehood, and weakness, and the patients were not long tortured, not racked and broken on the wheel as thousands upon thousands of
roturiers and
vilains, citizens and peasants were tortured, racked, and broken on the wheel in the good old time. It is, of course, terrible that the French, with this machine, once even amputated the head of their State, and no one knows whether they ought to be accused, on that account, of parricide or of suicide; but on more thorough reflection, we find that Louis of France was less a sacrifice to passion than to circumstances, and that those men who forced the people on to such a sacrifice, and who have themselves, in every age, poured forth princely blood far more abundantly, should not appear solely as accusers. Only two kings, both of them rather kings of the nobility than of the people, were sacrificed by the people, and that not in a time of peace, or to subserve petty interests, but in the extremest needs of war, when they saw themselves betrayed, and when they least spared their own blood. But certainly more than a thousand princes were treacherously slain, on account of avarice or frivolous interests, by the dagger, by the sword, and by the poison of nobility and priests. It really seems as though these castes regarded regicide as one of their privileges, and therefore bewail the more selfishly the death of Louis the XVI. and of Charles I. Oh! that kings at last would perceive that they could live more safely as kings of the people, and protected by the law, than under the guard of their noble body-murderers.
But not only have the heroes of our revolution and the revolution itself been slandered, but even our entire age has been parodied with unheard-of wickedness; and if one hears or reads our vile traducers and scorners, then he will learn that the people are the
canaille--the vile mob--that freedom is insolence, and with heaven-bent eyes and pious sighs, our enemies complain and bewail that we were frivolous and had, alas! no religion. Hypocritical, sneaking souls, who creep about bent down beneath the burden of their secret vices, dare to vilify an age which is, perhaps, holier than any of its predecessors or successors, an age that sacrifices itself for the sins of the past and for the happiness of the future, a Messiah among centuries, which could hardly endure its bloody crown of thorns and heavy cross, did it not now and then trill a merry vaudeville, and crack a joke at the modern Pharisees and Sadducees. Its colossal pains would be intolerable without such jesting and persiflage! Seriousness shows itself more majestically when laughter leads the way. And the age in this shows itself exactly like its children among the French, who have written very terribly wanton books, and yet have been very strong and serious when strength and seriousness were necessary, as, for instance, Laclos, and even Louvet de Couvray, who both fought for freedom with the self-sacrifice and boldness of martyrs, and yet who wrote in a very frivolous and indecent way, and, alas! had no religion!
As if freedom were not as good a religion as any other! And since it is ours, we may, meeting with the same measure, declare its contemners to be themselves frivolous and irreligious.
Yes, I repeat the words with which I began these pages: freedom is a new religion, the religion of our age. If Christ is not the God of this religion, he is still one of its high-priests, and his name shines consolingly in the hearts of its children. But the French are the chosen people of the new religion, the first gospels and dogmas were penned in their language. Paris is the New Jerusalem, and the Rhine is the Jordan which separates the land of Freedom from the land of the Philistines.
[The end]
Heinrich Heine's essay: Liberation