The French Revolution, vol 2 | Page 9

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 eyes. Let the time come and he will
be so in earnest, especially against his late master; all he has to do is to
give him a thrust with his pike. Until he acts out the part he spouts it,
and grows excited over his own tirades; his common sense gives way to
the bombastic jargon of the revolution and to declamation, which

completes the Utopian performance and eases his brain of its last
modicum of ballast.
It is not merely ideas which the new regime has disturbed, but it has
also disordered sentiments. "Authority is transferred from the Château
of Versailles and the courtier's antechamber, with no intermediary or
counterpoise, to the proletariat and its flatterers."[14] The whole of the
staff of the old government is brusquely set aside, while a general
election has brusquely installed another in is place, offices not being
given to capacity, seniority, and experience, but to self-sufficiency,
intrigue, and exaggeration. Not only are legal rights reduced to a
common level, but natural grades are transposed; the social ladder,
overthrown, is set up again bottom upwards; the first effect of the
promised regeneration is "to substitute in the administration of public
affairs pettifoggers for magistrates, ordinary citizens for cabinet
ministers, ex-commoners for ex-nobles, rustics for soldiers, soldiers for
captains, captains for generals, curés for bishops, vicars for curés,
monks for vicars, brokers for financiers, empiricists for administrators,
journalists for political economists, stump-orators for legislators, and
the poor for the rich." - Every species of covetousness is stimulated by
this spectacle. The profusion of offices and the anticipation of
vacancies "has excited the thirst for command, stimulated self-esteem,
and inflamed the hopes of the most inept. A rude and grim presumption
renders the fool and the ignoramus unconscious of their insignificance.
They have deemed themselves capable of anything, because the law
granted public functions merely to capacity. There has appeared in
front of one and all an ambitious perspective; the soldier thinks only of
displacing his captain, the captain of becoming general, the clerk of
supplanting the chief of his department, the new-fledged attorney of
being admitted to the high court, the curé of being ordained a bishop,
the shallow scribbler of seating himself on the legislative bench.
Offices and professions vacated by the appointment of so many upstarts
afford in their turn a vast field for the ambition of the lower classes." --
Thus, step by step, owing to the reversal of social positions, is brought
about a general intellectual fever.
"France is transformed into a gaming-table, where, alongside of the

discontented citizen offering his stakes, sits, bold, blustering, and with
fermenting brain, the pretentious subaltern rattling his dice- box. . . At
the sight of a public official rising from nowhere, even the soul of a
bootblack will bound with emulation." -- He has merely to push himself
ahead and elbow his way to secure a ticket "in this immense lottery of
popular luck, of preferment without merit, of success without talent, of
apotheoses without virtues, of an infinity of places distributed by the
people wholesale, and enjoyed by the people in detail." -- Political
charlatans flock thither from every quarters, those taking the lead who,
being most in earnest, believe in the virtue of their nostrum, and need
power to impose its recipe on the community; all being saviors, all
places belong to them, and especially the highest. They lay siege to
these conscientiously and philanthropically ; if necessary, they will take
them by assault, hold them through force, and, forcibly or otherwise,
administer their cure- all to the human species.

III.
Psychology of the Jacobin. -- His intellectual method. -- Tyranny of
formulae and suppression of facts. -- Mental balance disturbed. -- Signs
of this in the revolutionary language. -- Scope and expression of the
Jacobin intellect. -- In what respect his method is mischievous. -- How
it is successful. -- Illusions produced by it.
Such are our Jacobins, born out of social decomposition like
mushrooms out of compost. Let