Robespierre, a Study (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI ROBESPIERRE AND PARIS In the presence of such a recasting as that of the I oth of August a man is tempted to write not a chapter but a book. The time itself, grown used to a fundamental transformation, yet spoke of this new upheaval in whispers, calling it " Revolution." Open any memoir at random, read any speech of the succeeding autumn, and you will find this one thought running through them?a new basis of equilibrium had been discovered. Mai usa ne pot dura: the doubts and coverings of '91, the re-entrant agonies of early '92 had broken down as under a strain, and the real quarrel was ready to be threshed out?that is, the real truth had come up into the daylight. Shall I put it in one word ? Terrible, perhaps, to our time and to the ears of moderns, but finally explicative of that catastrophe ? The " upper class " had jjone. Hitherto tlie Revolution, working on a theory, metaphysical, preaching or postulating the dogma " equality," had had for its material those old divisions of society which not a century of persistent effort has appreciably weakened in Europe. Its leaders saw " the People " as worshippers see their God; and they made an image of " the People " after their own image. One group was for excluding (and succeeded in excluding) the proletariat from the vote; another claimed a full suffrage for "the People." In the chapel of the Jacobins night after night a vision of " the People" filled the darkness of the nave above the candles, haunted the remote and deserted chancel.It inflamed a hundred orators, and inspired the noblest rhetoric of that tribune. But" the People " were not there; doctors, lawyers, contractors, master carpenters, master masons, many young lords, and a few old liversl made up the audience to which could be thrown such golden enth...