书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
19097600000414

第414章

[9] Gustave Flaubert. "Tout notaire a rêvé des sultanes." (All barristers have dreams of being sultans!) (Madame Bovary"). --"Frédéric trouvait que le bonheur mérité par 1'excellence de son ame tardait à venir." (Frédéric found that the happiness he deserved due to his brilliancy was a long time coming.) ("L'Education sentimentale.)[10] Such has also been the effect of similar declarations set forth in the Constitutions of the United Nations, the European Community, as well as many individual nations. All that was required for the international Communist movement was then to await the slow promotion of the secret party members directed to seek a career inside the various legal administrations for, one day, to see all superior courts staffed by their men. (SR).

[11] Mallet du Pan, "Correspondance politique." 1796.

[12] "Entretiens du Père Gérard," by Collot d'Herbois. -- "Les Etrennes au Peuple," by Barrère.-"La Constitution fran?aise pour les habitants des campagnes," etc. - Later "L'Alphabet des Sans-Culottes, le Nouveau Catéchisme républicain, les Commandements de la Patrie et de la République (in verse), etc.

[13] Mercure de France, an article by Mallet du Pan, April 7, 1792.

(Summing up of the year 1791.)

[14] Mercure de France, see the numbers of Dec. 30, 1791, and April 7, 1792. (Note the phrase, it is close to Marx statement in 1850 'that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat.' SR.)[15] Fox, before deciding on any measure, consulted a Mr. H.---, one of the most uninfluential, and even narrow-minded members of the House of Commons. Some astonishment being expressed at this, he replied that he regarded Mr. H.---- as a perfect type of the faculties and prejudices of a country gentleman, and he used him as a thermometer.

Napoleon likewise stated that before framing an important law, he imagined to himself the impression it would make on the mind of a burly peasant.

[16] Just like the strong influence which the current fashionable principles and buzz-words introduced by the media have over today's audiences. (SR).

[17] Alas! This phenomenon should be repeated with the interminable speeches held by Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Castro, Mao and all the other inheritors of the Jacobin creed. (SR).

[18] Tableaux de la Révolution Fran?aise," by Schmidt (especially the reports by Dutard), 3 vols.

[19] "Correspondence of Gouverneur Morris," -- "Memoirs of Mallet du Pan," John Moore'

[20] 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."[21] 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.)[22] 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.