The French Revolution, vol 2 | Page 6

rights to a dinner while you want bread. Organize bodies of armed
men. March to the National Assembly and demand food at once,
supplied to you out of the national stocks. . . Demand that the nation's
poor have a future secured to them out of the national contribution. If
you are refused join the army, take the land, as well as gold which the
rascals who want to force you to come to terms by hunger have buried
and share it amongst you. Off with the heads of the ministers and their
underlings, for now is the time; that of Lafayette and of every rascal on
his staff, and of every unpatriotic battalion officer, including Bailly and
those municipal reactionaries - all the traitors in the National
Assembly!"
Marat, indeed, still passes for a furious ranter among people of some
intelligence. But for all that, this is the sum and substance of his theory:
It installs in the political establishment, over the heads of delegated,
regular, and legal powers an anonymous, imbecile, and terrific power
whose decisions are absolute, whose projects are constantly adopted,
and whose intervention is sanguinary. This power is that of the crowd,
of a ferocious, suspicious sultan, who, appointing his viziers, keeps his
hands free to direct them and his scimitar ready sharpened to cut of
their heads.
II. The Jacobins. -
Formation of the Jacobins. - The common human elements of his
character. - Conceit and dogmatism are sensitive and rebellious in
every community. - How kept down in all well-founded societies. -
Their development in the new order of things. -Effect of milieu on
imagination and ambitions. - The stimulants of Utopianism, abuses of
speech, and derangement of ideas. - Changes in office; interests playing
upon and perverted feeling.
That a speculator in his closet should have concocted such a theory is

comprehensible; paper will take all that is put upon it, while abstract
beings, the hollow simulacra and philosophic puppets he concocts, are
adapted to every sort of combination. - That a lunatic in his cell should
adopt and preach this theory is also comprehensible; he is beset with
phantoms and lives outside the actual world, and, moreover in this
ever-agitated democracy he is the eternal informer and instigator of
every riot and murder that takes place; he it is who under the name of
"the people's friend" becomes the arbiter of lives and the veritable
sovereign. -- That a people borne down with taxes, wretched and
starving, indoctrinated by public speakers and sophists, should have
welcomed this theory and acted under it is again comprehensible;
necessity knows no law, and where the is oppression, that doctrine is
true which serves to throw oppression off.
But that public men, legislators and statesmen, with, at last, ministers
and heads of the government, should have made this theory their own;
* that they should have more fondly clung to it as it became more
destructive;
* that, daily for three years they should have seen social order
crumbling away piecemeal under its blows and not have recognized it
as the instrument of such vast ruin;
* that, in the light of the most disastrous experience, instead of
regarding it as a curse they should have glorified it as a boon;
* that many of them - an entire party; almost all of the Assembly -
should have venerated it as a religious dogma and carried it to extremes
with enthusiasm and rigor of faith;
* that, driven by it into a narrow strait, ever getting narrower and
narrower, they should have continued to crush each other at every step;
* that, finally, on reaching the visionary temple of their so-called
liberty, they should have found themselves in a slaughter-house, and,
within its precincts, should have become in turn butcher and brute;

* that, through their maxims of a universal and perfect liberty they
should have inaugurated a despotism worthy of Dahomey, a tribunal
like that of the Inquisition, and raised human hecatombs like those of
ancient Mexico;
* that amidst their prisons and scaffolds they should persist in believing
in the righteousness of their cause, in their own humanity, in their
virtue, and, on their fall, have regarded themselves as martyrs -
is certainly strange. Such intellectual aberration, such excessive conceit
are rarely encountered, and a concurrence of circumstances, the like of
which has never been seen in the world but once, was necessary to
produce it.[8]
Extravagant conceit and dogmatism, however, are not rare in the
human species. These two roots of the Jacobin intellect exist in all
countries, underground and indestructible. Everywhere they are kept
from sprouting by the established order of things; everywhere are they
striving to overturn old historic foundations, which press them down.
Now, as in the past, students live in