France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
Sullen is the male heart, repressed by Patrollotism; vehement is
the female, irrepressible. The public-speaking woman at the
Palais Royal was not the only speaking one:—Men know not what the
pantry is, when it grows empty, only house-mothers know. O women,
wives of men that will only calculate and not act! Patrollotism
is strong; but Death, by starvation and military onfall, is
stronger. Patrollotism represses male Patriotism: but female
Patriotism? Will Guards named National thrust their bayonets into
the bosoms of women? Such thought, or rather such dim unshaped
raw-material of a thought, ferments universally under the female
night-cap; and, by earliest daybreak, on slight hint, will
explode.
Chapter 1.7.IV.
The Menads.
If Voltaire once, in splenetic humour, asked his countrymen: ‘But
you, _Gualches_, what have you invented?’ they can now answer:
The Art of Insurrection. It was an art needed in these last
singular times: an art, for which the French nature, so full of
vehemence, so free from depth, was perhaps of all others the
fittest.
Accordingly, to what a height, one may well say of perfection,
has this branch of human industry been carried by France, within
the last half-century! Insurrection, which, Lafayette thought,
might be “the most sacred of duties,” ranks now, for the French
people, among the duties which they can perform. Other mobs are
dull masses; which roll onwards with a dull fierce tenacity, a
dull fierce heat, but emit no light-flashes of genius as they go.
The French mob, again, is among the liveliest phenomena of our
world. So rapid, audacious; so clear-sighted, inventive, prompt
to seize the moment; instinct with life to its finger-ends! That
talent, were there no other, of spontaneously standing in queue,
distinguishes, as we said, the French People from all Peoples,
ancient and modern.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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