France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
Let the Reader confess too that, taking one thing with another,
perhaps few terrestrial Appearances are better worth considering
than mobs. Your mob is a genuine outburst of Nature; issuing
from, or communicating with, the deepest deep of Nature. When so
much goes grinning and grimacing as a lifeless Formality, and
under the stiff buckram no heart can be felt beating, here once
more, if nowhere else, is a Sincerity and Reality. Shudder at it;
or even shriek over it, if thou must; nevertheless consider it.
Such a Complex of human Forces and Individualities hurled forth,
in their transcendental mood, to act and react, on circumstances
and on one another; to work out what it is in them to work. The
thing they will do is known to no man; least of all to
themselves. It is the inflammablest immeasurable Fire-work,
generating, consuming itself. With what phases, to what extent,
with what results it will burn off, Philosophy and Perspicacity
conjecture in vain.
“Man,” as has been written, “is for ever interesting to man; nay
properly there is nothing else interesting.” In which light also,
may we not discern why most Battles have become so wearisome?
Battles, in these ages, are transacted by mechanism; with the
slightest possible developement of human individuality or
spontaneity: men now even die, and kill one another, in an
artificial manner. Battles ever since Homer’s time, when they
were Fighting Mobs, have mostly ceased to be worth looking at,
worth reading of, or remembering. How many wearisome bloody
Battles does History strive to represent; or even, in a husky
way, to sing:—and she would omit or carelessly slur-over this one
Insurrection of Women?
A thought, or dim raw-material of a thought, was fermenting all
night, universally in the female head, and might explode. In
squalid garret, on Monday morning, Maternity awakes, to hear
children weeping for bread. Maternity must forth to the streets,
to the herb-markets and Bakers’—queues; meets there with
hunger-stricken Maternity, sympathetic, exasperative. O we
unhappy women! But, instead of Bakers’-queues, why not to
Aristocrats’ palaces, the root of the matter? _Allons!_ Let us
assemble. To the Hôtel-de-Ville; to Versailles; to the Lanterne!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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