The French Revolution, vol 2 | Page 8

They are no longer subject to any ancient institutions, nor any armed
might which can restrain them. On the contrary, the new constitution,
through its theoretical declarations and the practical application of these,
invites them to let themselves go. -- For, on the one hand, legally, it
declares to be based upon pure reason, beginning with a long string of
abstract dogmas from which its positive prescriptions are assumed to be
rigorously deduced. As a consequence all laws are submitted to the
shallow comments of reasoners and quibblers who will both interpret
and break them according to the principles.[10] -- On the other hand, as
a matter of fact, it hands over all government powers to the elections
and confers on the clubs the control of the authorities: 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