*"The only difficulty that presents itself is, to determine whether recourse shall be had to the alternative of indulgence, or if it will not be more advantageous to persist in the plan of total destruction. "If the people that still remain were not more than thirty or forty thousand, the shortest way would doubtless be, to cut all their throats (egorger), agreeably to my first opinion; but the population is immense, amounting still to four hundred thousand souls.—If there were no hope of succeeding by any other methods, certainly it were better to kill all (egorger), even were there five hundred thousand. "But what are we to understand by measures of rigour? Is there no distinction to be made between rigorous and barbarous measures? The utmost severity is justified on the plea of the general good, but nothing can justify barbarity. If the welfare of France necessitated the sacrifice of the four hundred thousand inhabitants of La Vendee, and the countries in rebellion adjoining, they ought to be sacrificed: but, even in this case, there would be no excuse for those atrocities which revolt nature, which are an outrage to social order, and repugnant equally to feeling (sentiment) and reason; and in cutting off so many entire generations for the good of the country, we ought not to suffer the use of barbarous means in a single instance. "Now the most effectual way to arrive at this end (converting the people), would be by joyous and fraternal missions, frank and familiar harangues, civic repasts, and, above all, dancing. "I could wish, too, that during their circuits in these countries, the Representatives were always attended by musicians. The expence would be trifling, compared with the good effect; if, as I am strongly persuaded, we could thus succeed in giving a turn to the public mind, and close the bleeding arteries of these fertile and unhappy provinces." Lequinio, Guerre de La Vendee. And this people, who were either to have their throats cut, or be republicanized by means of singing, dancing, and revolutionary Pans and Silenus's, already beheld their property devastated by pillage or conflagration, and were in danger of a pestilence from the unburied bodies of their families.—Let the reader, who has seen Lequinio's pamphlet, compare his account of the sufferings of the Vendeans, and his project for conciliating them. They convey a strong idea of the levity of the national character; but, in this instance, I must suppose, that nature would be superior to local influence; and I doubt if Lequinio's jocund philosophy will ever succeed in attaching the Vendeans to the republic.
—Camille Desmouins, a republican reformer, nearly as sanguinary, though not more liberal, thought the guillotine disgraced by such ignorant prey, and that it were better to hunt them down like wild beasts; or, if made prisoners, to exchange them against the cattle of their country!—The eminently informed Herault de Sechelles was the patron and confidant of the exterminating reforms of Carrier; and Carnot, when the mode of reforming by noyades and fusillades was debated at the Committee, pleaded the cause of Carrier, whom he describes as a good, nay, an excellent patriot.—Merlin de Thionville, whose philosophy is of a more martial cast, was desirous that the natives of La Vendee should be completely annihilated, in order to furnish in their territory and habitations a recompence for the armies.—Almost every member of the Convention has individually avowed principles, or committed acts, from which common turpitude would recoil, and, as a legislative body, their whole code has been one unvarying subversion of morals and humanity. Such are the men who value themselves on possessing all the advantages the Vendeans are pretended to be in want of.—We will now examine what disciples they have produced, and the benefits which have been derived from their instructions.
Every part of France remarkable for an early proselytism to the revolutionary doctrines has been the theatre of crimes unparalleled in the annals of human nature. Those who have most boasted their contempt for religious superstition have been degraded by an idolatry as gross as any ever practiced on the Nile; and the most enthusiastic republicans have, without daring to murmur, submitted for two years successively to a horde of cruel and immoral tyrants.—A pretended enfranchisement from political and ecclesiastical slavery has been the signal of the lowest debasement, and the most cruel profligacy: the very Catechumens of freedom and philosophy have, while yet in their first rudiments, distinguished themselves as proficients in the arts of oppression and servility, of intolerance and licentiousness.—Paris, the rendezvous of all the persecuted patriots and philosophers in Europe, the centre of the revolutionary system, whose inhabitants were illumined by the first rays of modern republicanism, and who claim a sort of property in the rights of man, as being the original inventors, may fairly be quoted as an example of the benefits that would accrue from a farther dissemination of the new tenets.
Without reverting to the events of August and September, 1792, presided by the founders of liberty, and executed by their too apt sectaries, it is notorious that the legions of Paris, sent to chastise the unenlightened Vendeans, were the most cruel and rapacious banditti that ever were let loose to afflict the world. Yet, while they exercised this savage oppression in the countries near the Loire, their fellow-citizens on the banks of the Seine crouched at the frown of paltry tyrants, and were unresistingly dragged to dungeons, or butchered by hundreds on the scaffold.—At Marseilles, Lyons, Bourdeaux, Arras, wherever these baleful principles have made converts, they have made criminals and victims; and those who have been most eager in imbibing or propagating them have, by a natural and just retribution, been the first sacrificed. The new discoveries in politics have produced some in ethics not less novel, and until the adoption of revolutionary doctrines, the extent of human submission or human depravity was fortunately unknown.
In this source of guilt and misery the people of La Vendee are now to be instructed—that people, who are acknowledged to be hospitable, humane, and laborious, and whose ideas of freedom may be better estimated by their resistance to a despotism which the rest of France has sunk under, than by the jargon of pretended reformers.—I could wish, that not only the peasants of La Vendee, but those of all other countries, might for ever remain strangers to such pernicious knowledge. It is sufficient for this useful class of men to be taught the simple precepts of religion and morality, and those who would teach them more, are not their benefactors. Our age is, indeed, a literary age, and such pursuits are both liberal and laudable in the rich and idle; but why should volumes of politics or philosophy be mutilated and frittered into pamphlets, to inspire a disgust for labour, and a taste for study or pleasure, in those to whom such disgusts or inclinations are fatal. The spirit of one author is extracted, and the beauties of another are selected, only to bewilder the understanding, and engross the time, of those who might be more profitably employed.
I know I may be censured as illiberal; but I have, during my abode in this country, sufficiently witnessed the disastrous effects of corrupting a people through their amusements or curiosity, and of making men neglect their useful callings to become patriots and philosophers.*—
*This right of directing public affairs, and neglecting their own, we may suppose essential to republicans of the lower orders, since we find the following sentence of transportation in the registers of a popular commission: "Bergeron, a dealer in skins—suspected—having done nothing in favour of the revolution—extremely selfish (egoiste,) and blaming the Sans-Culottes for neglecting their callings, that they may attend only to public concerns."—Signed by the members of the Commission and the two Committees.
—"Il est dangereux d'apprendre au peuple a raisonner: il ne faut pas l'eclairer trop, parce qu'il n'est pas possible de l'eclairer assez." ["It is dangerous to teach the people to reason—they should not be too much enlightened, because it is not possible to enlighten them sufficiently.">[—When the enthusiasm of Rousseau's genius was thus usefully submitted to his good sense and knowledge of mankind, he little expected every hamlet in France would be inundated with scraps of the contrat social, and thousands of inoffensive peasants massacred for not understanding the Profession de Foi.
The arguments of mistaken philanthropists or designing politicians may divert the order of things, but they cannot change our nature—they may create an universal taste for literature, but they will never unite it with habits of industry; and until they prove how men are to live without labour, they have no right to banish the chearful vacuity which usually accompanies it, by substituting reflections to make it irksome, and propensities with which it is incompatible.
The situation of France has amply demonstrated the folly of attempting to make a whole people reasoners and politicians—there seems to be no medium; and as it is impossible to make a nation of sages, you let loose a horde of savages: for the philosophy which teaches a contempt for accustomed restraints, is not difficult to propagate; but that superior kind, which enables men to supply them, by subduing the passions that render restraints necessary, is of slow progress, and never can be general.