All civil and political revolutions were once confined to the land in which they were born. The French Revolution had no territory of its own. More than that, its effect was in a sense to wipe the map clean of all existing borders. It united some men and divided others in spite of laws, traditions, characters, and language, at times turning compatriots into enemies and strangers into brothers. Or, rather, it transcended all particular nationalities to create a common intellectual fatherland, which could accommodate men of all nations as citizens.

Search all history's annals and you will not find a single political revolution possessing this character, which is found only in certain religious revolutions. If an analogy can help us understand the French Revolution, the term of comparison must therefore be with religious revolutions.

Schiller, in his history of the Thirty Years' War, justly remarks that the great Reformation of the sixteenth century suddenly diminished the distance between peoples that had previously barely known one another, spurring new sympathies and fostering close unity among them. Indeed, one saw Frenchmen stand shoulder to shoulder with Englishmen to do battle with other Frenchmen, while men born in the remotest regions of the Baltic raced to the heart of Germany to protect Germans of whom they had previously never heard. All foreign wars took on certain aspects of civil war, and in all civil wars foreigners took part. Nations forgot their old interests in favor of new ones.