The French Revolution, vol 2 | Page 8

which is to offer a premium to the presumption of the ambitious who put themselves forward because they think themselves capable, and who defame their rulers purposely to displace them. - Every government department, organization or administrative system is like a hothouse which serves to favor some species of the human plant and wither others. This one is the best one for the propagation and rapid increase of the coffee- house politician, club haranguer, the stump-speaker, the street- rioter, the committee dictator -- in short, the revolutionary and the tyrant. In this political hothouse wild dreams and conceit will assume monstrous proportions, and, in a few months, brains that are now only ardent become hotheads.
Let us trace the effect of this excessive, unhealthy temperature on imaginations and ambitions. The old tenement is down; the foundations of the new one are not yet laid; society has to be made over again from top to bottom. All willing men are asked to come and help, and, as one plain principle suffices in drawing a plan, the first comer may succeed. Henceforth political fancies swarm in the district meetings, in the clubs, in the newspapers, in pamphlets, and in every head-long, venturesome brain.
"There is not a merchant's clerk educated by reading the 'Nouvelle Héloise,'[11] not a school teacher that has translated ten pages of Livy, not an artist that has leafed through Rollin, not an aesthete converted into journalists by committing to memory the riddles of the 'Contrat Social,' who does not draft a constitution. . . As nothing is easier than to perfect a daydream, all perturbed minds gather, and become excited, in this ideal realm. They start out with curiosity and end up with enthusiasm. The man in the street rushes to the enterprise in the same manner as a miser to a conjurer promising treasures, and, thus childishly attracted, each hopes to find at once, what has never been seen under even the most liberal governments: perpetual perfection, universal brotherhood, the power of acquiring what one lacks, and a life composed wholly of enjoyment."
One of these pleasures, and a keen one, is to daydream. One soars in space. By means of eight or ten ready-made sentences, found in the six-penny catechisms circulated by thousands in the country and in the suburbs of the towns and cities,[12] a village attorney, a customs clerk, a theater attendant, a sergeant of a soldier's mess, becomes a legislator and philosopher. He criticizes Malouet, Mirabeau, the Ministry, the King, the Assembly, the Church, foreign Cabinets, France, and all Europe. Consequently, on these important subjects, which always seemed forever forbidden to him, he offers resolutions, reads addresses, makes harangues, obtains applause, and congratulates himself on having argued so well and with such big words. To hold fort on questions that are not understood is now an occupation, a matter of pride and profit.
"More is uttered in one day," says an eye-witness,[13] "in one section of Paris than in one year in all the Swiss political assemblies put together. An Englishman would give six weeks of study to what we dispose of in a quarter of an hour."
Everywhere, in the town halls, in popular meetings, in the sectional assemblies, in the wine shops, on the public promenades, on street corners vanity erects a tribune of verbosity.
"Contemplate the incalculable activity of such a machine in a loquacious nation where the passion for being something dominates all other affections, where vanity has more phases than there are starts in the firmament, where reputations already cost no more than the trouble of insisting on their being deserved, where society is divided between mediocrities and their trumpeters who laud them as divinities; where so few people are content with their lot, where the corner grocer is prouder of his epaulette than the Grand Condé of his Marshal's baton, where agitation without object or resources is perpetual, where, from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self- esteem, in disputation, caviling and sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters a word, but to teach, never imagining that to learn one must keep quiet; where the triumphs of a few lunatics entice every crackbrain from his den; where, with two nonsensical ideas put together out of a book that is not understood, a man assumes to have principles; where swindlers talk about morality, women of easy virtue about civism, and the most infamous of beings about the dignity of the species; where the discharged valet of a grand seignior calls himself Brutus!"
- In reality, he is Brutus in his own