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[ "Correspondence of Gouverneur Morris,"—"Memoirs of Mallet du Pan," John Moore']
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[ See, in "Progrès de l'esprit humaine," the superiority awarded to the republican constitution of 1793. (Book IX.) "The principles from which the constitution and laws of France have been combined are purer, more exact, and deeper than those which governed the Americans: they have more completely escaped the influence of every sort of prejudice, etc.">[
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[ Camille Desmoulins, the enfant terrible of the Revolution, confesses this, as well as other truths. After citing the Revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "which derived their virtue from and had their roots in conscience, which were sustained by fanaticism and the hopes of another world," he thus concludes: "Our Revolution, purely political, is wholly rooted in egotism, in everybody's amour propre, in the combinations of which is found the common interest." ("Brissot dévoilé," by Camille Desmoulins, January, 1792)—Bouchez et Roux, XIII, 207.)]
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[ Rousseau's idea of the omnipotence of the State is also that of Louis XIV and Napoleon... It is curious to see the development of the same idea in the mind of a contemporary bourgeois, like Rétif de la Bretonne, half literary and half one of the people ("Nuits de Paris," XVe nuit, 377, on the September Massacres) "No, I do not pity those fanatical priests; they have done the country too much mischief. Whatever a society, or a majority of it, desires, that is right. He who opposes this, who calls down war and vengeance on the Nation, is a monster. Order is always found in the agreement of the majority. The minority is always guilty, I repeat it, even if it is morally right. Nothing but common sense is needed to see that truth."—Ibid. (On the execution of Louis XVI.), p. 447. "Had the nation the right to condemn and execute him? No thinking person can ask such a question. The nation is everything in itself; its power is that which the whole human kind would have if but one nation, one single government governed the globe. Who would dare then dispute the power of humanity? It is this indisputable power that a nation has, to hang even an innocent man, felt by the ancient Greeks, which led them to exile Aristoteles and put Phocion to death. 'Oh truth, unrecognized by our contemporaries, what evil has arisen through forgetting it!'">[
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[ Moniteur, XI. 46. Speech by Isnard in the Assembly, Jan. 5, 1792. "The people are now conscious of their dignity. They know, according to the constitution, that every Frenchman's motto is: 'Live free, the equal of all, and one of the common sovereignty.'"—Guillon de Montléon, I. 445. Speech by Chalier, in the Lyons Central Club, March 21, 1793. "Know that you are kings, and more than kings. Do you not feel sovereignty circulating in your veins?">[