then a deserter, next a barrier-clerk, now serving as spokesman for
the Faubourg St. Honoré and finally president of the September commune;
there was also, doubtless, St. Huruge alias Père Adam, the great barker
of the Palais-Royal, a marquis fallen into the gutter, drinking with and
dressing like a common porter, always flourishing an enormous club and
followed by the riffraff.[2528]--These are all the leaders. The Jacobins
of the municipality and of the Assembly confine their support of
the enterprise to conniving at it and to giving it their
encouragement.[2529] It is better for the insurrection to seem
spontaneous. Through caution or shyness the Girondins, Pétion, Manual
and Danton himself, keep in the background----there is not reason for
their coming forward.--The rest, affiliated with the people and lost in
the crowd, are better qualified to fabricate the story which their flock
will like. This tale, adapted to the crowd's intellectual limits, form
and activity, is both simple and somber, such as children like, or
rather a melodrama taken from an alien stage in which the good appear
on one side, and the wicked on the other with an ogre or tyrant in the
center, some infamous traitor who is sure to be unmasked at the end of
the piece and punished according to his deserts, the whole grandiloquent
terms and, as a finale, winding up with a grand chorus. In the raw brain
of an over-excited workman politics find their way only in the shape
of rough-hewn, highly-colored imagery, such as is furnished by the
Marseillaise, the Carmagnole, and the Ça ira. The requisite motto is
adapted to his use; through this misshapen magnifying glass the most
gracious figure appears under a diabolical aspect. Louis XVI. is
represented here "as a monster using his power and treasure to oppose
the regeneration of the French. A new Charles IX., he desires to bring
on France death and desolation. Be gone, cruel man, your crimes must
end! Damiens was less guilty than thou art! He was punished with the
most horrible torture for having tried to rid France of a monster,
while you, attempting twenty-five million times more, are allowed full
immunity![2530] Let us trample under our feet this simulacra of royalty!
Tremble tyrants, Scoevolas are still amongst you!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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