characters, like Barrère, Louvet, Garat, Manuel, and Ronsin, college
professors like Louchet and Romme, schoolmasters like Leonard Bourdon,
journalists like Brissot, Desmoulins and Freron, actors like Collot
d'Herbois, artists like Sergent, Oratoriens[1203] like Fouché, capuchins
like Chabot, more or less secularized priests like Lebon, Chasles,
Lakanal, and Grégoire, students scarcely out of school like St.
Just, Monet of Strasbourg, Rousseline of St. Albin, and Julien of the
Drôme--in short, the poorly sown and badly cultivated minds, and on
which the theory had only to fall to smother the good grain and thrive
like a nettle. Add to these charlatans and others who live by their
wits, the visionary and morbid of all sorts, from Fanchet and Klootz
to Châlier or Marat, the whole of that needy, chattering, irresponsible
crowd, ever swarming about large cities ventilating its shallow conceits
and abortive pretensions. Farther in the background appear those whose
scanty education qualifies them to half understand an abstract principle
and imperfectly deduce its consequences, but whose roughly-polished
instinct atones for the feebleness of a coarse argumentation. Through
cupidity, envy and rancor, they divine a rich pasture-ground behind
the theory, and Jacobin dogmas become dearer to them, because the
imagination sees untold treasures beyond the mists in which they are
shrouded. They can listen to a club harangue without falling asleep,
applaud its tirades in the rights place, offer a resolution in a public
garden, shout in the tribunes, pen affidavits for arrests, compose
orders-of-the-day for the national guard, and lend their lungs, arms,
and sabers to whoever bids for them. But here their capacity ends.
In this group merchants' and notaries' clerks abound, like Hébert and
Henriot, Vincent and Chaumette, butchers like Legendre, postmasters like
Drouet, boss-joiners like Duplay, school-teachers like that Buchot who
becomes a minister, and many others of the same sort, accustomed to
jotting down ideas, with vague notions of orthography and who are apt
in speech-making,[1204] foremen, sub-officers, former begging friars,
peddlers, tavern-keepers, retailers, market-porters, and city-journeymen
from Gouchon, the orator of the faubourg St. Antoine, down to Simon, the
cobbler of the Temple, from Trinchard, the juryman of the Revolutionary
Tribunal, down to grocers, tailors, shoemakers, tapster, waiters,
barbers, and other shopkeepers or artisans who do their work at home,
and who are yet to do the work of the September massacres. Add to these
the foul remnants of every popular insurrection and dictatorship, beasts
of prey like Jourdain of Avignon, and Fournier the American, women like
Théroigne, Rose Lacombe, and the tricoteuses of the Convention who have
unsexed themselves, the amnestied bandits and other gallows birds who,
for lack of a police, have a wide range, street-rollers and vagabonds,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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