The French Revolution, Volume 2 potx

CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
The Origins of Contemporary France
by Hippolyte A. Taine
The Origins of Contemporary France by Hippolyte A. Taine 1
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Title: The French Revolution, Volume 2 Title: The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3
Author: Hippolyte A. Taine
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This Etext prepared by Svend Rom <> Note that I have followed the numbering of
Volumes, Books, Chapters and Sections in the French not the American edition. The remarks made me are
initialled SR.
Svend Rom, April 2000.
The French Revolution, Volume 2 ^M The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3^M ^M by Hippolyte
A. Taine^M
THE REVOLUTION. Volume II. THE JACOBIN CONQUEST.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION VOLUME II. THE JACOBIN CONQUEST.
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION VOLUME II.
BOOK FIRST. THE JACOBINS.
Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor 6
CHAPTER I.
The Establishment of the new political organ. 6 I. The Revolutionary Party. II. The Jacobins. III. Jacobin
Mentality. IV. What the Theory Promises.
CHAPTER I. 7
CHAPTER II.
The Party. I. Formation of the Party II. Jacobin and other Associations III. The Press. IV. The Clubs. V.
Jacobin Power.
BOOK SECOND. THE FIRST STAGE OF THE CONQUEST.
CHAPTER II. 8
CHAPTER I.
The Jacobins in Power. I. Manipulating the Vote. II. Danger of holding Public Office. III. Pursuit of the
Opponents. IV. Turmoil. V. Tactics of Intimidation.
CHAPTER I. 9
CHAPTER II.
The Legislative Assembly. I. New Incompetent Assembly. II. Jacobin Intelligence and Culture. III. Their

Sessions. IV. The political Parties. V. Means and Ways. VI. Political Tactics.
CHAPTER II. 10
CHAPTER III.
Policy of the Assembly. I. Lawlessness. II. Revolutionary Laws. III. War. IV. Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
V. Citoyens! Aux Armes!!
CHAPTER III. 11
CHAPTER IV.
The Departments. I. Provence in 1792. II. The expedition to Aix. III. Marseilles against Arles. IV. The
Jacobins of Avignon. V. The Class Struggle.
CHAPTER IV. 12
CHAPTER V.
PARIS. I. Weakening of the King. II. The Armed Revolutionaries. III. Jacobin Rabble-rousers. IV. The King
in front of the people.
CHAPTER V. 13
CHAPTER VI.
The Birth of the Terrible Paris Commune. I. The Plan of the Girondists. II. Girondists Foiled. III. Preparations
for the Coup. IV. The Commune in Action. V. Purging the Assembly. VI. Take-over. VII. The King's
Submission. VIII. Paris and its Jacobin leaders.
BOOK THIRD. THE SECOND STAGE OF THE CONQUEST.
CHAPTER VI. 14
CHAPTER I.
Mob rule in times of anarchy. I. Brigands. II. Homicidal Part of Revolutionary Creed. III. Terror is their
Salvation. IV. Carnage. V. Abasement and Stupor. VI. Jacobin Massacre.
CHAPTER I. 15
CHAPTER II.
THE DEPARTMENTS. I. The Sovereignty of the People II. Robbers and Victims. III. Local Dictature. IV.
Jacobin Violence, Rape and Pillage. V. The Roving Gangs. VI. The Programme of the Party.
CHAPTER II. 16
CHAPTER III.
The New Sovereigns I. Sharing the Spoils. II. Doctoring the Elections III Electoral Control IV: The New

Republican Assembly. V. The Jacobins forming alone the Sovereign People. VI. Composition of the Jacobin
Party. VII. The Jacobin Chieftains.
CHAPTER III. 17
CHAPTER IV.
TAKEN HOSTAGE. I. Jacobin tactics and power. II. Jacobin characters and minds. III. Physical fear and
moral cowardice. IV. Jacobin victory over Girondist majority. V. Jacobin violence against the people. VI.
Jacobin tactics. VII. The central Jacobin committee in power. VIII. Right or Wrong, my Country.
Preface:
In this volume, as in those preceding it and in those to come, there will be found only the history of Public
Authorities. Others will write that of diplomacy, of war, of the finances, of the Church; my subject is a limited
one. To my great regret, however, this new part fills an entire volume; and the last part, on the revolutionary
government, will be as long.
I have again to regret the dissatisfaction I foresee this work will cause to many of my countrymen. My excuse
is, that almost all of them, more fortunate than myself, have political principles which serve them in forming
their judgments of the past. I had none; if indeed, I had any motive in undertaking this work, it was to seek for
political principles. Thus far I have attained to scarcely more than one; and this is so simple that will seem
puerile, and that I hardly dare express it. Nevertheless I have adhered to it, and in what the reader is about to
peruse my judgments are all derived from that; its truth is the measure of theirs. It consists wholly in this
observation: that
HUMAN SOCIETY, ESPECIALLY A MODERN SOCIETY, IS A VAST AND COMPLICATED THING.
Hence the difficulty in knowing and comprehending it. For the same reason it is not easy to handle the subject
well. It follows that a cultivated mind is much better able to do this than an uncultivated mind, and a man
specially qualified than one who is not. From these two last truths flow many other consequences, which, if
the reader deigns to reflect on them, he will have no trouble in defining.
H. A. Taine, Paris 1881.
BOOK FIRST. THE JACOBINS.
CHAPTER IV. 18
CHAPTER I.
THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE NEW POLITICAL ORGAN.
In this disorganized society, in which the passions of the people are the sole real force, authority belongs to

the party that understands how to flatter and take advantage of these. As the legal government can neither
repress nor gratify them, an illegal government arises which sanctions, excites, and directs these passions.
While the former totters and falls to pieces, the latter grows stronger and improves its organization, until,
becoming legal in its turn, it takes the other's place.
I.
Principle of the revolutionary party. - Its applications.
As a justification of these popular outbreaks and assaults, we discover at the outset a theory, which is neither
improvised, added to, nor superficial, but now firmly fixed in the public mind. It has for a long time been
nourished by philosophical discussions. It is a sort of enduring, long-lived root out of which the new
constitutional tree has arisen. It is the dogma of popular sovereignty. Literally interpreted, it means that the
government is merely an inferior clerk or servant.[1] We, the people, have established the government; and
ever since, as well as before its organization, we are its masters. Between it and us no infinite or long lasting
"contract". "None which cannot be done away with by mutual consent or through the unfaithfulness of one of
the two parties." Whatever it may be, or provide for, we are nowise bound by it; it depends wholly on us. We
remain free to "modify, restrict, and resume as we please the power of which we have made it the depository."
Through a primordial and inalienable title deed the commonwealth belongs to us and to us only. If we put this
into the hands of the government it is as when kings delegate authority for the time being to a minister He is
always tempted to abuse; it is our business to watch him, warn him, check him, curb him, and, if necessary,
displace him. We must especially guard ourselves against the craft and maneuvers by which, under the pretext
of preserving law and order, he would tie our hands. A law, superior to any he can make, forbids him to
interfere with our sovereignty; and he does interfere with it when he undertakes to forestall, obstruct, or
impede its exercise. The Assembly, even the Constituent, usurps when it treats the people like a lazybones (roi
fainéant), when it subjects them to laws, which they have not ratified, and when it deprives them of action
except through their representatives.[2] The people themselves must act directly, must assemble together and
deliberate on public affairs. They must control and censure the acts of those they elect; they must influence
these with their resolutions, correct their mistakes with their good sense, atone for their weakness by their
energy, stand at the helm alongside of them, and even employ force and throw them overboard, so that the
ship may be saved, which, in their hands, is drifting on a rock.[3] Such, in fact, is the doctrine of the popular
party. This doctrine is carried into effect July 14 and October 5 and 6, 1789. Loustalot, Camille Desmoulins,
Fréron, Danton, Marat, Pétion, Robespierre proclaim it untiringly in the political clubs, in the newspapers, and

in the assembly. The government, according to them, whether local or central, trespasses everywhere. Why,
after having overthrown one despotism, should we install another? We are freed from the yoke of a privileged
aristocracy, but we still suffer from "the aristocracy of our representatives."[4] Already at Paris, "the
population is nothing, while the municipality is everything". It encroaches on our imprescriptible rights in
refusing to let a district revoke at will the five members elected to represent it at the Hôtel-de-Ville, in passing
ordinances without obtaining the approval of voters, in preventing citizens from assembling where they
please, in interrupting the out-door meetings of the clubs in the Palais Royal where "Patriots are driven away
be the patrol." Mayor Bailly, "who keeps liveried servants, who gives himself a salary of 110,000 livres," who
distributes captains' commissions, who forces peddlers to wear metallic badges, and who compels newspapers
to have signatures to their articles is not only a tyrant, but a crook, thief and "guilty of lése-nation." Worse
are the abuses of the National Assembly. To swear fidelity to the constitution, as this body has just done, to
impose its work on us, forcing us to take a similar oath, disregarding our superior rights to veto or ratify their
decisions,[5] is to "slight and scorn our sovereignty". By substituting the will of 1200 individuals for that of
the people, "our representatives have failed to treat us with respect." This is not the first time, and it is not to
CHAPTER I. 19
be the last. Often do they exceed their mandate, they disarm, mutilate, and gag their legitimate sovereign and
they pass decrees against the people in the people's name. Such is their martial law, specially devised for
"suppressing the uprising of citizens", that is to say, the only means left to us against conspirators,
monopolists, and traitors. Such a decree against publishing any kind of joint placard or petition, is a decree
"null and void," and "constitutes a most flagrant attack on the nation's rights."[6] Especially is the electoral
law one of these, a law which, requiring a small qualification tax for electors and a larger one for those who
are eligible, "consecrates the aristocracy of wealth." The poor, who are excluded by the decree, must regard it
as invalid; register themselves as they please and vote without scruple, because natural law has precedence
over written law. It would simply be "fair reprisal" if, at the end of the session, the millions of citizens lately
deprived of their vote unjustly, should seize the usurping majority by the threat and tell them:
"You cut us off from society in your chamber, because you are the strongest there; we, in our turn, cut you off
from the living society, because we are strongest in the street. You have killed us civilly - we kill you
physically."
Accordingly, from this point of view, all riots are legitimate. Robespierre from the rostrum[7] excuses
jacqueries, refuses to call castle-burners brigands, and justifies the insurgents of Soissons, Nancy, Avignon,

and the colonies. Desmoulins, alluding to two men hung at Douai, states that it was done by the people and
soldiers combined, and declares that: "Henceforth, I have no hesitation in saying it they have legitimated
the insurrection;" they were guilty, and it was well to hang them.[8] Not only do the party leaders excuse
assassinations, but they provoke them. Desmoulins, "attorney-general of the Lantern, insists on each of the 83
departments being threatened with at least one lamppost hanging." (This sobriquet is bestowed on Desmoulins
on account of his advocacy of street executions, the victims of revolutionary passions being often hung at the
nearest lanterne, or street lamp, at that time in Paris suspended across the street by ropes or chains. - (Tr.))
Meanwhile Marat, in the name of principle, constantly sounds the alarm in his journal:
"When public safety is in peril, the people must take power out of the hands of those whom it is entrusted . . .
Put that Austrian woman and her brother-in-law in prison . . . Seize the ministers and their clerks and put them
in irons . . . Make sure of the mayor and his lieutenants; keep the general in sight, and arrests his staff. . . The
heir to the throne has no 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.

CHAPTER I. 20
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 garrets, bohemians in lodgings, physicians
without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely offices, so many Brissots, Dantons, Marats,
Robespierres, and St. Justs in embryo; only, for lack of air and sunshine, they never come to maturity. At
twenty, on entering society, a young man's judgment and pride are extremely sensitive. - - Firstly, let his
society be what it will, it is for him a scandal to pure reason: for it was not organized by a legislative
philosopher in accordance with a sound principle, but is the work of one generation after another, according to
manifold and changing necessities. It is not a product of logic, but of history, and the new-fledged thinker
shrugs his shoulders as he looks up and sees what the ancient tenement is, the foundations of which are
CHAPTER I. 21
arbitrary, its architecture confused, and its many repairs plainly visible. In the second place, whatever
degree of perfection preceding institutions, laws, and customs have reached, these have not received his
approval; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, he is being subjected beforehand to moral, political,
and social forms which pleased them. Whether they please him or not is of no consequence. Like a horse
trotting along between the poles of a wagon in the harness that happens to have been put on his back, he has to
make best of it. Besides, whatever its organization, as it is essentially a hierarchy, he is nearly always
subaltern in it, and must ever remain so, either soldier, corporal or sergeant. Even under the most liberal
system, that in which the highest grades are accessible to all, for every five or six men who take the lead or
command others, one hundred thousand must follow or be commanded. This makes it vain to tell every
conscript that he carriers a marshal's baton in his sack, when, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a
thousand, he discovers too late, on rummaging his sack, that the baton is not there. - - It is not surprising that
he is tempted to kick against social barriers within which, willing or not, he is enrolled, and which predestine
him to subordination. It is not surprising that on emerging from traditional influences he should accept a
theory, which subjects these arrangements to his judgment and gives him authority over his superiors. And all
the more because there is no doctrine more simple and better adapted to his inexperience, it is the only one he
can comprehend and manage off-hand. Hence it is that young men on leaving college, especially those who
have their way to make in the world, are more or less Jacobin, - it is a disorder of growing up.[9] In well

organized communities this ailment is beneficial, and soon cured. The public establishment being substantial
and carefully guarded, malcontents soon discover that they have not enough strength to pull it down, and that
on contending with its guardians they gain nothing but blows. After some grumbling, they too enter at one or
the other of its doors, find a place for themselves, and enjoy its advantages or become reconciled to their lot.
Finally, either through imitation, or habit, or calculation, they willingly form part of that garrison which, in
protecting public interests, protects their own private interests as well. Generally, after ten years have gone by,
the young man has obtained his rank in the file, where he advances step by step in his own compartment,
which he no longer thinks of tearing to pieces, and under the eye of a policeman who he no longer thinks of
condemning. He even sometimes thinks that policeman and compartment are useful to him. Should he
consider the millions of individuals who are trying to mount the social ladder, each striving to get ahead of the
other, it may dawn upon him that the worst of calamities would be a lack of barriers and of guardians.
Here the worm-eaten barriers have cracked all at once, their easy- going, timid, incapable guardians having
allowed things to take their course. Society, accordingly, disintegrated and a pell-mell, is turned into a
turbulent, shouting crowd, each pushing and being pushed, all alike over-excited and congratulating each
other on having finally obtained elbow-room, and all demanding the new barriers shall be as fragile and the
new guardians as feeble, as defenseless, and as inert as possible. This is what has been done. As a natural
consequence, those who were foremost in the rank have been relegated to the last; many have been struck
down in the fray, while in this permanent state of disorder, which goes under the name of lasting order,
elegant footwear continue to be stamped upon by hobnailed boots and wooden shoes. - The fanatic and the
intemperate egoists can now let themselves go. 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.
CHAPTER I. 22
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 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.
CHAPTER I. 23
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 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
CHAPTER I. 24
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![15] Any 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;[16] if 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.[17] The 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,[18] and in the narratives of foreigners,[19] who, 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

CHAPTER I. 25