"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.
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.
