rsonal weaknesses, luxurious habits, family solicitudes, the
intrigues of a mistress and the caprices of a wife, govern a state of
twenty-six millions of men with an arbitrariness, a heedlessness, a
prodigality, a lack of skill, an absence of consistency that would
scarcely be overlooked in the management of a private domain.--The king
and the privileged excel in one direction, in manners, in good taste,
in fashion, in the talent for representation and in entertaining and
receiving, in the gift of graceful conversation, in finesse and in
gaiety, in the art of converting life into a brilliant and ingenious
festivity, regarding the world as a drawing room of refined idlers in
which it suffices to be amiable and witty, whilst, actually, it is an
arena where one must be strong for combats, and a laboratory in which
one must work in order to be useful.--Through the habit, perfection
and sway of polished intercourse they stamped on the French intellect
a classic form, which, combined with recent scientific acquisitions,
produced the philosophy of the eighteenth century, the disrepute of
tradition, the ambition of recasting all human institutions according
to the sole dictates of Reason, the appliance of mathematical methods
to politics and morals, the catechism of the Rights of Man, and other
dogmas of anarchical and despotic character in the CONTRAT SOCIAL.--Once
this chimera is born they welcome it as a drawing room fancy; they
use the little monster as a plaything, as yet innocent and decked with
ribbons like a pastoral lambkin; they never dream of its becoming a
raging, formidable brute; they nourish it, and caress it, and then,
opening their doors, they let it descend into the streets.--Here among
the middle class which the government has rendered ill-disposed by
compromising its fortunes, which the privileged have offended by
restricting its ambition, which is wounded by inequality through injured
self-esteem, the revolutionary theory gains rapid accessions, a sudden
asperity, and, in a few years, it finds itself undisputed master of
public opinion.--At this moment and at its summons, another colossal
monster rises up, a monster with millions of heads, a blind, startled
animal, an entire people pressed down, exasperated and suddenly loosened
against the government whose exactions have despoiled it, against the
privileged whose rights have reduced it to starvation, without, in these
rural districts abandoned by their natur