His intellectual method.—Tyranny of formulae andsuppression of facts.—Mental balance disturbed.—Signs ofthis in the revolutionary language.—Scope and expression ofthe Jacobin intellect.—In what respect his method ismischievous.—How it is successful.—Illusions produced byit.
Such are our Jacobins, born out of social decomposition like mushrooms out of compost. Let us consider their inner organization, for they have one as formerly the Puritans; we have only to follow their dogma down to its depths, as with a sounding-line, to reach the psychological stratum in which the normal balance of faculty and sentiment is overthrown.
When a statesman, who is not wholly unworthy of that great name, finds an abstract principle in his way, as, for instance, that of popular sovereignty, he accepts it, if he accepts it at all, according to his conception of its practical bearings. He begins, accordingly, by imagining it applied and in operation. From personal recollections and such information as he can obtain, he forms an idea of some village or town, some community of moderate size in the north, in the south, or in the center of the country, for which he has to make laws. He then imagines its inhabitants acting according to his principle, that is to say, voting, mounting guard, levying taxes, and administering their own affairs. Familiar with ten or a dozen groups of this sort, which he regards as examples, he concludes by analogy as to others and the rest on the territory. Evidently it is a difficult and uncertain process; to be exact, or nearly so, requires rare powers of observation and, at each step, a great deal of tact, for a nice calculation has to be made on given quantities imperfectly ascertained and imperfectly noted!1115Any political leader who does this successfully, does it through the ripest experience associated with genius. And even then he keeps his hand on the check-rein in pushing his innovation or reform; he is almost always tentative; he applies his law only in part, gradually and provisionally; he wishes to ascertain its effect; he is always ready to stay its operation, amend it, or modify it, according to the good or ill results of experiment; the state of the human material he has to deal with is never clear to his mind, even when superior, until after many and repeated gropings.—Now the Jacobin pursues just the opposite course. His principle is an axiom of political geometry, which always carries its own proof along with it; for, like the axioms of common geometry, it is formed out of the combination of a few simple ideas, and its evidence imposes itself at once on all minds capable of embracing in one conception the two terms of which it is the aggregate expression. Man in general, the rights of Man, the social contract, liberty, equality, reason, nature, the people, tyrants, are examples of these basic concepts: whether precise or not, they fill the brain of the new sectarian. Often these terms are merely vague and grandiose words, but that makes no difference; as soon as they meet in his brain an axiom springs out of them that can be instantly and absolutely applied on every occasion and to excess. Mankind as it is does not concern him. He does not observe them; he does not require to observe them; with closed eyes he imposes a pattern of his own on the human substance manipulated by him; the idea never enters his head of forming any previous conception of this complex, multiform, swaying material—contemporary peasants, artisans, townspeople, curés and nobles, behind their plows, in their homes, in their shops, in their parsonages, in their mansions, with their inveterate beliefs, persistent inclinations, and powerful wills. Nothing of this enters into or lodges in his mind; all its avenues are stopped by the abstract principle which flourishes there and fills it completely. Should actual experience through the eye or ear plant some unwelcome truth forcibly in his mind, it cannot subsist there; however noisy and relentless it may be, the abstract principle drives it out;1116if need be it will distort and strangle it, considering it a slanderer since it refutes a principle which is true and undeniable in itself. Obviously, a mind of this kind is not sound; of the two faculties which should pull together harmoniously, one is degenerated and the other overgrown; facts cannot turn the scale against the theory. Charged on one side and empty on the other, the Jacobin mind turns violently over on that side to which it leans, and such is its incurable infirmity.
Consider, indeed, the authentic monuments of Jacobin thought, the "Journal des Amis de la Constitution," the gazettes of Loustalot, Desmoulins, Brissot, Condorcet, Fréron and Marat, Robespierre's, and St. Just's pamphlets and speeches, the debates in the Legislative Assembly and in the Convention, the harangues, addresses and reports of the Girondins and Montagnards, in brief, the forty volumes of extracts compiled by Buchez and Roux. Never has so much been said to so little purpose; all the truth that is uttered is drowned in the monotony and inflation of empty verbiage and vociferous bombast. One experience in this direction is sufficient.1117The historian who resorts this mass of rubbish for accurate information finds none of any account; in vain will he read kilometers of it: hardly will he there meet one fact, one instructive detail, one document which brings before his eyes a distinct personality, which shows him the real sentiments of a villager or of a gentleman, which vividly portrays the interior of a hôtel-de-ville, of a soldier's barracks, of a municipal chamber, or the character of an insurrection. To define fifteen or twenty types and situations which sum up the history of the period, we have been and shall be obliged to seek them elsewhere—in the correspondence of local administrators, in affidavits on criminal records, in confidential reports of the police,1118and in the narratives of foreigners,1119who, prepared for it by a different education, look behind words for things, and see France beyond the "Contrat Social." This teeming France, this grand tragedy which twenty-six millions of players are performing on a stage of 26 000 square leagues, is lost to the Jacobin. His literature, as well as his brain, contain only insubstantial generalizations like those above cited, rolling out in a mere play of ideas, sometimes in concise terms when the writer happens to be a professional reasoner like Condorcet, but most frequently in a tangled, knotty style full of loose and disconnected meshes when the spokesman happens to be an improvised politician or a philosophic tyro like the ordinary deputies of the Assembly and the speakers of the clubs. It is a pedantic scholasticism set forth with fanatical rant. Its entire vocabulary consists of about a hundred words, while all ideas are reduced to one, that of man in himself: human units, all alike equal and independent, contracting together for the first time. This is their concept of society. None could be briefer, for, to arrive at it, man had to be reduced to a minimum. Never were political brains so willfully dried up. For it is the attempt to systematize and to simplify which causes their impoverishment. In that respect they go by the methods of their time and in the track of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: their outlook on life is the classic view, which, already narrow in the late philosophers, has now become even more narrow and hardened. The best representatives of the type are Condorcet,1120among the Girondins, and Robespierre, among the Montagnards, both mere dogmatists and pure logicians, the latter the most remarkable and with a perfection of intellectual sterility never surpassed.—Unquestionably, as far as the formulation of durable laws is concerned, i.e. adapting the social machinery to personalities, conditions, and circumstances; their mentality is certainly the most impotent and harmful. It is organically short-sighted, and by interposing their principles between it and reality, they shut off the horizon. Beyond their crowd and the club it distinguishes nothing, while in the vagueness and confusion of the distance it erects the hollow idols of its own Utopia.—But when power is to be seized by assault, and a dictatorship arbitrarily exercised, the mechanical inflexibility of such a mind is useful rather than detrimental. It is not embarrassed or slowed down, like that of a statesman, by the obligation to make inquiries, to respect precedents, of looking into statistics, of calculating and tracing beforehand in different directions the near and remote consequences of its work as this affects the interests, habits, and passions of diverse classes. All this is now obsolete and superfluous: the Jacobin knows on the spot the correct form of government and the good laws. For both construction as well as for destruction, his rectilinear method is the quickest and most vigorous. For, if calm reflection is required to get at what suits twenty-six millions of living Frenchmen, a mere glance suffices to understand the desires of the abstract men of their theory. Indeed, according to the theory, men are all shaped to one pattern, nothing being left to them but an elementary will; thus defined, the philosophic robot demands liberty, equality and popular sovereignty, the maintenance of the rights of man and adhesion to the "Contrat Social." That is enough: from now on the will of the people is known, and known beforehand; a consultation among citizens previous to action is not essential; there is no obligation to await their votes. In any events, a ratification by the people is sure; and should this not be forthcoming it is owing to their ignorance, disdain or malice, in which case their response deserves to be considered as null. The best thing to do, consequently, through precaution and to protect the people from what is bad for them, is to dictate to them what is good for them.—Here, the Jacobin might be sincere; for the men in whose behalf he claims rights are not flesh-and-blood Frenchmen, as we see them in the streets and in the fields, but men in general, as they ought to be on leaving the hands of Nature, or after the teachings of Reason. As to the former, there is no need of being scrupulous because they are infatuated with prejudices and their opinions are mere drivel; as for the latter, it is just the opposite: full of respect for the vainglorious images of his own theory, of ghosts produced by his own intellectual device, the Jacobin will always bow down to responses that he himself has provided, for, the beings that he has created are more real in his eyes than living ones and it is their suffrage on which he counts. Accordingly, viewing things in the worst lights, he has nothing against him but the momentary antipathy of a purblind generation. To offset this, he enjoys the approval of humanity, self-obtained; that of a posterity which his acts have regenerated; that of men who, thanks to him, who are again become what they should never have ceased to be. Hence, far from looking upon himself as an usurper or a tyrant, he considers himself the natural mandatory of a veritable people, the authorized executor of the common will. Marching along in the procession formed for him by this imaginary crowd, sustained by millions of metaphysical wills created by himself in his own image, he has their unanimous assent, and, like a chorus of triumphant shouts, he will fill the outward world with the inward echo of his own voice.
How it flatters wounded self-esteem.—The ruling passion ofthe Jacobin.—Apparent both in style and conduct.—He aloneis virtuous in his own estimation, while his adversaries arevile.—They must accordingly be put out of the way.—Perfection of this character.—Common sense and moral senseboth perverted.
When an ideology attracts people, it is less due to its sophistication than to the promises it holds out. It appeals more to their desires than to their intelligence; for, if the heart sometimes may be the dupe of the head, the latter is much more frequently the dupe of the former. We do not accept a system because we deem it a true one, but because the truth we find in it suits us. Political or religious fanaticism, any theological or philosophical channel in which truth flows, always has its source in some ardent longing, some secret passion, some accumulation of intense, painful desire to which a theory affords and outlet. In the Jacobin, as well as in the Puritan, there is a fountain-head of this description. What feeds this source with the Puritan is the anxieties of a disturbed conscience which, forming for itself some idea of perfect justice, becomes rigid and multiplies the commandments it believes that God has promulgated; on being constrained to disobey these it rebels, and, to impose them on others, it becomes tyrannical even to despotism. The first effort of the Puritan, however, wholly internal, is self-control; before becoming political he becomes moral. With the Jacobin, on the contrary, the first precept is not moral, political; it is not his duties which he exaggerates but his rights, while his doctrine, instead of being a prick to his conscience, flatters his pride.1121However vast and insatiate human pride may be, now it is satisfied, for never before has it had so much to feed upon.—In the program of the sect, do not look for the restricted prerogatives growing out of self-respect which the proud-spirited man claims for himself, such as civil rights accompanied by those liberties that serve as sentinels and guardians of these rights—security for life and property, the stability of the law, the integrity of courts, equality of citizens before the law and under taxation, the abolition of privileges and arbitrary proceedings, the election of representatives and the administration of public funds. Summing it up, the precious guarantees which render each citizen an inviolable sovereign on his limited domain, which protect his person and property against all species of public or private oppression and exaction, which maintain him calm and erect before competitors as well as adversaries, upright and respectful in the presence of magistrates and in the presence of the government.
A Malouet, a Mounier, a Mallet du Pan, partisans of the English Constitution and Parliament, may be content with such trifling gifts, but the Jacobin theory holds them all cheap, and, if need be, will trample them in the dust. Independence and security for the private citizen is not what it promises, not the right to vote every two years, not a moderate exercise of influence, not an indirect, limited and intermittent control of the commonwealth, but political dominion in the full and complete possession of France and the French people. There is no doubt on this point. In Rousseau's own words, the "Contrat Social" prescribes "the complete alienation to the community of each associate and all his rights," every individual surrendering himself wholly, "just as he may actually be, he himself and all his powers of which his possessions form a part," so that the state not only the recognized owner of property, but of minds and bodies as well, may forcibly and legitimately impose on every member of it such education, form of worship, religious faith, opinions and sympathies as it deems best.1122Now each man, solely because he is a man, is by right a member of this despotic sovereignty. Whatever, accordingly, my condition may be, my incompetence, my ignorance, my insignificance in the career in which I have plodded along, I have full control over the fortunes, lives, and consciences of twenty-six million French people, being accordingly Czar and Pope, according to my share of authority.——But if I adhere strictly to this doctrine, I am yet more so than my quota warrants. This royal prerogative with which I am endowed is only conferred on those who, like myself, sign the Social Contract in full; others, merely because they reject some clause of it, incur a forfeiture; no one must enjoy the advantages of a pact of which some of the conditions are repudiated.—Even better, as this pact is based on natural right and is obligatory, he who rejects it or withdraws from it, becomes by that act a miscreant, a public wrong-doer and an enemy of the people. There were once crimes of royal lèse-majesty; now there are crimes of popular lèse-majesty. Such crimes are committed when by deed, word, or thought, any portion whatever of the more than royal authority belonging to the people is denied or contested. The dogma through which popular sovereignty is proclaimed thus actually ends in a dictatorship of the few, and a proscription of the many. Outside of the sect you are outside of the laws. We, the five or six thousand Jacobins of Paris, are the legitimate monarch, the infallible Pontiff, and woe betide the refractory and the lukewarm, all government agents, all private persons, the clergy, the nobles, the rich, merchants, traders, the indifferent among all classes, who, steadily opposing or yielding uncertain adhesion, dare to throw doubt on our unquestionable right.
One by one these consequences are to come into light, and it is evident that, let the logical machinery by which they unfold themselves be what it may, no ordinary person, unless of consummate vanity, will fully adopt them. He must have an exalted opinion of himself to consider himself sovereign otherwise than by his vote, to conduct public business with no more misgivings than his private business, to directly and forcibly interfere with this, to set himself up, he and his clique, as guides, censors and rulers of his government, to persuade himself that, with his mediocre education and average intellect, with his few scraps of Latin and such information as is obtained in reading-rooms, coffee-houses, and newspapers, with no other experience than that of a club, or a municipal council, he could discourse wisely and well on the vast, complex questions which superior men, specially devoted to them, hesitate to take up. At first this presumption existed in him only in germ, and, in ordinary times, it would have remained, for lack of nourishment, as dry-rot or creeping mold, But the heart knows not what strange seeds it contains! Any of these, feeble and seemingly inoffensive, needs only air and sunshine to become a noxious excrescence and a colossal plant. Whether third or fourth rate attorney, counselor, surgeon, journalist, curé, artist, or author, the Jacobin is like the shepherd that has just found, in one corner of his hut, a lot of old parchments which entitle him to the throne. What a contrasts between the meanness of his calling and the importance with which the theory invests him! With what rapture he accepts a dogma that raises him so high in his own estimation! Diligently conning the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution, all the official documents that confer on him such glorious prerogatives, charging his imagination with them, he immediately assumes a tone befitting his new position.1123—Nothing surpasses the haughtiness and arrogance of this tone. It declares itself at the outset in the harangues of the clubs and in the petitions to the Constituent Assembly. Loustalot, Fréron, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, St. Just, always employ dictatorial language, that of the sect, and which finally becomes the jargon of their meanest valets. Courtesy or toleration, anything that denotes regard or respect for others, find no place in their utterances nor in their acts; a swaggering, tyrannical conceit creates for itself a language in its own image, and we see not only the foremost actors, but their minor associates, enthroned on their grandiloquent platform. Each in his own eyes is Roman, savior, hero, and great man.
"I stood in the tribune of the palace," writes Anarcharsis Clootz,1124"at the head of the foreigners, acting as ambassador of the human species, while the ministers of the tyrants regarded me with a jealous and disconcerted air."
A schoolmaster at Troyes, on the opening of the club in that town, advises the women "to teach their children, as soon as they can utter a word, that they are free and have equal rights with the mightiest potentates of the universe."1125Pétion's account of the journey in the king's carriage, on the return from Varennes, must be read to see how far self-importance of a pedant and the self-conceit of a lout can be carried.1126In their memoirs and even down to their epitaphs, Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, Roland, and Madame Roland1127give themselves certificates of virtue and, if we could take their word for it, they would pass for Plutarch's model characters.—This infatuation, from the Girondins to the Montagnards, continues to grow. St. Just, at the age of twenty-four, and merely a private individual, is already consumed with suppressed ambition. Marat says:
"I believe that I have exhausted every combination of the human intellect in relation to morality, philosophy and political science."
Robespierre, from the beginning to the end of the Revolution, is always, in his own eyes, Robespierre the unique, the one pure man, the infallible and the impeccable; no man ever burnt to himself the incense of his own praise so constantly and so directly.—At this level, conceit may drink the theory to the bottom, however revolting the dregs and however fatal its poison even to those defy its nausea for the sake of swallowing it. And, since it is virtue, no one may refuse it without committing a crime. Thus construed, the theory divides Frenchmen into two groups: one consisting of aristocrats, fanatics, egoists, the corrupt, bad citizens in short, and the other patriots, philosophers, and the virtuous, that is to say, those belonging to the sect.1128Thanks to this reduction, the vast moral and social world with which they deal finds its definition, expression, and representation in a ready-made antithesis. The aim of the government is now clear: the wicked must submit to the good, or, which is briefer, the wicked must be suppressed. To this end let us employ confiscation, imprisonment, exile, drowning and the guillotine and a large scale. All means are justifiable and meritorious against these traitors; now that the Jacobin has canonized his slaughter, he slays through philanthropy.—Thus is the forming of his personality completed like that of a theologian who becomes inquisitor. Extraordinary contrasts are gathered to construct it:—a lunatic that is logical, and a monster that pretends to have a conscience. Under the pressure of his faith and egotism, he has developed two deformities, one of the head and the other of the heart; his common sense is gone, and his moral sense is utterly perverted. In fixing his mind on abstract formulas, he is no longer able to see men as they are. His self-admiration makes him consider his adversaries, and even his rivals, as miscreants deserving of death. On this downhill road nothing stops him, for, in qualifying things inversely to their true meaning, he has violated within himself the precious concepts which brings us back to truth and justice. No light reaches eyes which regard blindness as clear-sightedness; no remorse affects a soul which erects barbarism into patriotism, and which sanctions murder with duty.
1101 (return)[ Cf. "The Ancient Régime," p. 242. Citations from the "Contrat Social."—Buchez et Roux, "Histoire Parlementaire," XXVI. 96. Declaration of rights read by Robespierre in the Jacobin club, April 21, 1793, and adopted by the club as its own. "The people is sovereign, the government is its work and its property, and public functionaries are its clerks. The people can displace its mandatories and change its government when it pleases."]
1102 (return)[ Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other dictators that like that also organized elections and saw themselves as being the people, speaking and acting on their behalf and therefore entitled to do anything they pleased.(SR).]
1103 (return)[ Rightly so, might Lenin have thought when he first read this text. Later, under his and Stalin's leadership the Party, guided by the first secretary of its central committee, aided by the secret police, should penetrate all affairs slowly extending their power or influence to the entire world through their secret party members, mutually ensuring their promotion into the highest posts, the party will eventually come to govern the world. (SR).]
1104 (return)[ Buchez and Roux, III, 324.. (An article by Loustalot, Sept. 8, 1789). Ibid. 331 Motion of the District of Cordéliers, presided over by Danton.—Ibid 239.. Denunciation of the municipality by Marat.—V., 128, Vi. 24-41 (March, 1790). The majority of the districts demand the permanent authority of the districts, that is to say, of the sovereign political assemblies]
1105 (return)[ Buchez et Roux. IV. 458. Meeting of Feb. 24, 1790, an article by Loustalot.—III 202. Speech by Robespierre, meeting of Oct. 21, 1789. Ibid. 219. Resolution of the district of St. Martin declaring that martial law shall not be enforced. Ibid. 222. Article by Loustalot.]
1106 (return)[ Buchez et Roux, X. 124, an article by Marat.—X. 1-22, speech by Robespierre at the meeting of May 9, 1791.-III. an article by Loustalot. III. 217, speech by Robespierre, meeting of Oct.22, 1789. Ibid. 431, article by Loustalot and Desmoulins, Nov., 1789.—VI. 336, articles by Loustalot and Marat, July, 1790.]
1107 (return)[ Ernest Hamel, "Histoire de Robespierre", passim, (I.436). Robespierre proposed to confer political rights on the blacks.—Buchez et Roux, IX. 264 (March, 1791).]
1108 (return)[ Buchez et Roux, V. 146 (March, 1790); VI. 436 (July 26, 1790); VIII. 247 (Dec 1790); X. 224 (June, 1791).]
1109 (return)[ Gustave Flaubert. "Tout notaire a rêvé des sultanes." (All barristers have dreams of being sultans!) (Madame Bovary").—"Frédéric trouvait que le bonheur mérité par l'excellence de son âme tardait à venir." (Frédéric found that the happiness he deserved due to his brilliancy was a long time coming.) ("L'Education sentimentale.)]
1110 (return)[ Such has also been the effect of similar declarations set forth in the Constitutions of the United Nations, the European Community, as well as many individual nations. All that was required for the international Communist movement was then to await the slow promotion of the secret party members directed to seek a career inside the various legal administrations for, one day, to see all superior courts staffed by their men. (SR).]
1111 (return)[ Mallet du Pan, "Correspondance politique." 1796.]
1112 (return)[ "Entretiens du Père Gérard," by Collot d'Herbois.—"Les Etrennes au Peuple," by Barrère.-"La Constitution française pour les habitants des campagnes," etc.—Later "L'Alphabet des Sans-Culottes, le Nouveau Catéchisme républicain, les Commandements de la Patrie et de la République (in verse), etc."]
1113 (return)[ Mercure de France, an article by Mallet du Pan, April 7, 1792. (Summing up of the year 1791.)]
1114 (return)[ Mercure de France, see the numbers of Dec. 30, 1791, and April 7, 1792. (Note the phrase, it is close to Marx statement in 1850 'that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.' SR.)]
1115 (return)[ Fox, before deciding on any measure, consulted a Mr. H.—, one of the most uninfluential, and even narrow-minded members of the House of Commons. Some astonishment being expressed at this, he replied that he regarded Mr. H.—-as a perfect type of the faculties and prejudices of a country gentleman, and he used him as a thermometer. Napoleon likewise stated that before framing an important law, he imagined to himself the impression it would make on the mind of a burly peasant.]
1116 (return)[ Just like the strong influence which the current fashionable principles and buzz-words introduced by the media have over today's audiences. (SR).]
1117 (return)[ Alas! This phenomenon should be repeated with the interminable speeches held by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Mao and all the other inheritors of the Jacobin creed. (SR).]
1118 (return)[ "Tableaux de la Révolution Française," by Schmidt (especially the reports by Dutard), 3 vols.]
1119 (return)[ "Correspondence of Gouverneur Morris,"—"Memoirs of Mallet du Pan," John Moore']
1120 (return)[ See, in "Progrès de l'esprit humaine," the superiority awarded to the republican constitution of 1793. (Book IX.) "The principles from which the constitution and laws of France have been combined are purer, more exact, and deeper than those which governed the Americans: they have more completely escaped the influence of every sort of prejudice, etc."]
1121 (return)[ Camille Desmoulins, the enfant terrible of the Revolution, confesses this, as well as other truths. After citing the Revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "which derived their virtue from and had their roots in conscience, which were sustained by fanaticism and the hopes of another world," he thus concludes: "Our Revolution, purely political, is wholly rooted in egotism, in everybody's amour propre, in the combinations of which is found the common interest." ("Brissot dévoilé," by Camille Desmoulins, January, 1792)—Bouchez et Roux, XIII, 207.)]
1122 (return)[ Rousseau's idea of the omnipotence of the State is also that of Louis XIV and Napoleon... It is curious to see the development of the same idea in the mind of a contemporary bourgeois, like Rétif de la Bretonne, half literary and half one of the people ("Nuits de Paris," XVe nuit, 377, on the September Massacres) "No, I do not pity those fanatical priests; they have done the country too much mischief. Whatever a society, or a majority of it, desires, that is right. He who opposes this, who calls down war and vengeance on the Nation, is a monster. Order is always found in the agreement of the majority. The minority is always guilty, I repeat it, even if it is morally right. Nothing but common sense is needed to see that truth."—Ibid. (On the execution of Louis XVI.), p. 447. "Had the nation the right to condemn and execute him? No thinking person can ask such a question. The nation is everything in itself; its power is that which the whole human kind would have if but one nation, one single government governed the globe. Who would dare then dispute the power of humanity? It is this indisputable power that a nation has, to hang even an innocent man, felt by the ancient Greeks, which led them to exile Aristoteles and put Phocion to death. 'Oh truth, unrecognized by our contemporaries, what evil has arisen through forgetting it!'"]
1123 (return)[ Moniteur, XI. 46. Speech by Isnard in the Assembly, Jan. 5, 1792. "The people are now conscious of their dignity. They know, according to the constitution, that every Frenchman's motto is: 'Live free, the equal of all, and one of the common sovereignty.'"—Guillon de Montléon, I. 445. Speech by Chalier, in the Lyons Central Club, March 21, 1793. "Know that you are kings, and more than kings. Do you not feel sovereignty circulating in your veins?"]
1124 (return)[ Moniteur, V. 136. (Celebration of the Federation, July 14, 1790.)]
1125 (return)[ Albert Babeau, "Histoire de Troyes pendant la Révolution," I. 436 (April 10, 1790).]
1126 (return)[ Mortimer-Ternaux, "Histoire de la Terreur," I. 353. (Pétion's own narrative of this journey.) This pert blockhead cannot even spell: he writes aselle for aisselle, etc. He is convinced that Madame Elizabeth, the king's sister, wants to seduce him, and that she makes advances to him: "If we had been alone, I believe that she would have fallen into my arms, and let the impulses of nature have their way." He makes a display of virtue however, and becomes only the more supercilious as he talks with the king, the young dauphin, and the ladies he is fetching back.]
1127 (return)[ The "Mémoires de Madame Roland" is a masterpiece of that conceit supposed to be so careflilly concealed as not to be visible and never off its stilts. "I am beautiful, I am affectionate, I am sensitive, I inspire love, I reciprocate, I remain virtuous, my mind is superior, and my courage indomitable. I am philosopher, statesman, and writer, worthy of the highest success," is constantly in her mind, and always perceptible in her phraseology. Real modesty never shows itself. On the contrary, many indecorous things are said and done by her from bravado, and to set herself above her sex. Cf. the "Memoirs of Mirs. Hutchinson," which present a great contrast. Madame Roland wrote: "I see no part in society which suits me but that of Providence."—The same presumption shines out in others, with less refined pretensions. The deputy Rouyer addresses the following letter, found among the papers of the iron wardrobe, to the king, "I have compared, examined, and foreseen everything. All I ask to carry out my noble purposes, is that direction of forces, which the law confers on you. I am aware of and brave the danger; weakness defers to this, while genius overcomes it I have turned my attention to all the courts of Europe, and am sure that I can force peace on them."—Robert, an obscure pamphleteer, asks Dumouriez to make him ambassador to Constantinople, while Louvet, the author of "Faublas," declares in his memoirs that liberty perished in 1792, because he was not appointed Minister of Justice.]
1128 (return)[ Moniteur, p. 189. Speech by Collot d'Herbois, on the mitraillades at Lyons. "We too, possess sensibility! The Jacobins have every virtue; they are compassionate, humane, and generous. These virtues, however, are reserved for patriots, who are their brethren, but never for aristocrats."—Meillan, "Mémoires," p. 4. "Robespierre was one day eulogizing a man named Desfieux, well known for his lack of integrity, and whom he finally sacrificed. 'But, I said to him, your man Desfieux is known to be a rascal.'—'No matter,' he replied, 'he is a good patriot.'—'But he is a fraudulent bankrupt.'-'He is a good patriot.'—'But he is a thief.'—'He is a good patriot.' I could not get more than these three words out of him."]
Its recruits—These are rare in the upper class and amongstthe masses.—They are numerous in the low bourgeois classand in the upper stratum of the people.—The position andeducation which enroll a man in the party.
Personalities like these are found in all classes of society; no situation or position in life protects one from wild Utopia or frantic ambition. We find among the Jacobins a Barras and a Châteauneuf-Randon, two nobles of the oldest families; Condorcet, a marquis, mathematician, philosopher and member of two renowned academies; Gobel, bishop of Lydda and suffragan to the bishop of Bâle; Hérault de Séchellles, a protégé of the Queen's and attorney-general to the Paris parliament; Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, chief-justice and one of the richest land-owners in France; Charles de Hesse, major-general, born in the royal family; and, last of all, a prince of the blood and fourth personage in the realm, the Duke of Orleans.—But, with the exception of these rare deserters, neither the hereditary aristocracy nor the upper magistracy, nor the highest of the middle class, none of the land-owners who live on their estates, or the leaders of industrial and commercial enterprises, no one belonging to the administration, none of those, in general, who are or deserve to be considered social authorities, furnish the party with recruits. All have too much at stake in the political establishment, shattered as it is, to wish its entire demolition. Their political experience, brief as it is, enables them to see at once that a habitable house is not built by merely tracing a plan of it on paper according the theorems of school geometry.—On the other hand, among the ordinary rural population the ideology finds, unless it can be changed into a legend, no listeners. Share croppers, small holders and farmers looking after their own plots of ground, peasants and craftsmen who work too hard to think and whose minds never range beyond a village horizon, busy only with that which brings in their daily bread, find abstract doctrines unintelligible; should the dogmas of the new catechism arrest their attention the same thing happens as with the old one, they do not understand them; that mental faculty by which an abstraction is reached is not yet formed in them. On being taken to a political club they fall asleep; they open their eyes only when some one announces that tithes and feudal privileges are to be restored; they can be depended on for nothing more than a brawl and a jacquerie; later on, when their grain comes to be taxed or is taken, they prove as unruly under the republic as under the monarchy.
The believers in this theory come from other quarters, from the two extremes of the lower stratum of the middle class and the upper stratum of the low class. Again, in these two contiguous groups, which merge into each other, those must be left out who, absorbed in their daily occupations or professions, have no time or thought to give to public matters, who have reached a fair position in the social hierarchy and are not disposed to run risks, almost all of them well-established, steady-going, mature, married folks who have sown their wild oats and whom experience in life has rendered distrustful of themselves and of theories. Overweening conceit is, most of the time, only average in the average human being, so speculative ideas will with most people only obtain a loose, transient and feeble hold. Moreover, in this society which, for many centuries consists of people accustomed to being ruled, the hereditary spirit is bourgeois that is to say, used to discipline, fond of order, peaceable and even timid.—There remains a minority, a very small one,1201innovating and restless. This consisted, on the one hand, of people who were discontented with their calling or profession, because they were of secondary or subaltern rank in it.1202Some were debutantes not fully employed and others aspirants for careers not yet entered upon. Then, on the other hand, there were the men of unstable character and all those who were uprooted by the immense upheaval of things: in the Church, through the suppression of convents and through schism; in the judiciary, in the administration, in the financial departments, in the army, and in various private and public careers, through the reorganization of institutions, through the novelty of fresh resources and occupations, and through the disturbance caused by the changed relationships of patrons and clients. Many who, in ordinary times, would otherwise remain quiet, become in this way nomadic and extravagant in politics. Among the foremost of these are found those who, through a classical education, can take in an abstract proposition and deduce its consequences, but who, for lack of special preparation for it, and confined to the narrow circle of local affairs, are incapable of forming accurate conceptions of a vast, complex social organization, and of the conditions which enable it to subsist. Their talent lies in making a speech, in dashing off an editorial, in composing a pamphlet, and in drawing up reports in more or less pompous and dogmatic style; the genre admitted, a few of them who are gifted become eloquent, but that is all. Among those are the lawyers, notaries, bailiffs and former petty provincial judges and attorneys who furnish the leading actors and two-thirds of the members of the Legislative Assembly and of the Convention: There are surgeons and doctors in small towns, like Bo, Levasseur, and Baudot, second and third-rate literary characters, like Barrère, Louvet, Garat, Manuel, and Ronsin, college professors like Louchet and Romme, schoolmasters like Leonard Bourdon, journalists like Brissot, Desmoulins and Freron, actors like Collot d'Herbois, artists like Sergent, Oratoriens1203like Fouché, capuchins like Chabot, more or less secularized priests like Lebon, Chasles, Lakanal, and Grégoire, students scarcely out of school like St. Just, Monet of Strasbourg, Rousseline of St. Albin, and Julien of the Drôme—in short, the poorly sown and badly cultivated minds, and on which the theory had only to fall to smother the good grain and thrive like a nettle. Add to these charlatans and others who live by their wits, the visionary and morbid of all sorts, from Fanchet and Klootz to Châlier or Marat, the whole of that needy, chattering, irresponsible crowd, ever swarming about large cities ventilating its shallow conceits and abortive pretensions. Farther in the background appear those whose scanty education qualifies them to half understand an abstract principle and imperfectly deduce its consequences, but whose roughly-polished instinct atones for the feebleness of a coarse argumentation. Through cupidity, envy and rancor, they divine a rich pasture-ground behind the theory, and Jacobin dogmas become dearer to them, because the imagination sees untold treasures beyond the mists in which they are shrouded. They can listen to a club harangue without falling asleep, applaud its tirades in the rights place, offer a resolution in a public garden, shout in the tribunes, pen affidavits for arrests, compose orders-of-the-day for the national guard, and lend their lungs, arms, and sabers to whoever bids for them. But here their capacity ends. In this group merchants' and notaries' clerks abound, like Hébert and Henriot, Vincent and Chaumette, butchers like Legendre, postmasters like Drouet, boss-joiners like Duplay, school-teachers like that Buchot who becomes a minister, and many others of the same sort, accustomed to jotting down ideas, with vague notions of orthography and who are apt in speech-making,1204foremen, sub-officers, former begging friars, peddlers, tavern-keepers, retailers, market-porters, and city-journeymen from Gouchon, the orator of the faubourg St. Antoine, down to Simon, the cobbler of the Temple, from Trinchard, the juryman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, down to grocers, tailors, shoemakers, tapster, waiters, barbers, and other shopkeepers or artisans who do their work at home, and who are yet to do the work of the September massacres. Add to these the foul remnants of every popular insurrection and dictatorship, beasts of prey like Jourdain of Avignon, and Fournier the American, women like Théroigne, Rose Lacombe, and the tricoteuses of the Convention who have unsexed themselves, the amnestied bandits and other gallows birds who, for lack of a police, have a wide range, street-rollers and vagabonds, rebels against labor and discipline, the whole of that class in the center of civilization which preserves the instincts of savages, and asserts the sovereignty of the people to glut a natural appetite for license, laziness, and ferocity.—Thus is the party recruited through an enlisting process that gleans its subjects from every station in life, but which reaps them down in great swaths, and gathers them together in the two groups to which dogmatism and presumption naturally belong. Here, education has brought man to the threshold, even to the heart of general ideas; consequently, he feels hampered within the narrow bounds of his profession or occupation, and aspires to something beyond. But as his education has remained superficial or rudimentary, consequently, outside of his narrow circle he feels out of his place. He has a perception or obtains a glimpse of political ideas and, therefore, assumes that he has capacity. But his perception is confided to a formula, and he sees them dimly through a cloud; hence his incapacity, and the reason why his mental lacunae as well as his attainments both contribute to make him a Jacobin.