The revolution is therefore the utmost sin in the political sphere. Take other, equally serious sins, usurpation, tyranny, suppression of conscience, — these are transgressions of God's order. But they are still not the fundamental abolition of God's order, not defiance of the authority of God's order, in order to put the authority of a human order in its place. Therefore, by the same measure, the sin on the side of revolution is always blacker than on the other side. The Parisian blood wedding* was an unprecedented horror. Perhaps that outrageous misdeed conjured up revolution as a disastrous fate; perhaps the innocent head of Louis XVI fell as penance for the bloodguilt of Charles IX. But even the sin of the blood wedding pales in comparison to that systematic, celebrated strangling during the years of the Terror, since it did not even pretend to do God a service, but instead slaughtered the victims on the altars of popular idolatry.
One might object to what I've said: How can revolution be so absolutely damnable, since it has indisputably brought about a higher good? Would one want, for example, to wish a return to conditions before 1789: the unrestricted whim of the king to authorize lettres de cachet,** the degradation of the bourgeois under those born into the nobility, the serfdom of the peasantry, the lack of rights for all those not belonging to the state church? Is not the removal of all this indisputably a good? And do we not owe this good to the revolution?
All this I grant, but I ask: Is it not also a good that man has knowledge of good and evil, like God? And yet it was the snake who tempted humans in Paradise to seize this good! All forms of good turn into evil when man acquires this knowledge on his own, outside of God's order. The knowledge of good and evil is a good; but that man learned to distinguish between good and evil by his own sinning, that is the evil. The political freedom that revolution perceives as a sweet-looking fruit is a good; but the fact that this is not sought within the order resting on God's commandment and God's providence, but by way of a completely different order, [one] meant to be based on the will of man, that is the evil, and thereby all the good being sought also turns into evil. One wanted legal limits on the monarchy, and see, one lost the monarchy itself, that refuge of the nations; one wanted the good right of the bourgeois against the nobility, and one unleashed a war of the poor against the property owners; one wanted freedom of conscience, and one de-Christianized the state. And among us, too, where these abuses have long since ceased to exist, one lusted after political freedom in the spirit of revolution, and this befell us, just as the Jewish people in the desert lusted after meat and God gave them quails in abundance, so that [the people] became nauseated as a result. — —
* The St. Bartholomew’s day massacre of 1588, when Catholics killed thousands of Protestants in Paris – ed.
** Royal orders, arresting and holding an individual indefinitely, without charges being brought – ed.
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