h the disturbance
caused by the changed relationships of patrons and clients. Many who, in
ordinary times, would otherwise remain quiet, become in this way nomadic
and extravagant in politics. Among the foremost of these are found those
who, through a classical education, can take in an abstract proposition
and deduce its consequences, but who, for lack of special preparation
for it, and confined to the narrow circle of local affairs, are
incapable of forming accurate conceptions of a vast, complex social
organization, and of the conditions which enable it to subsist.
Their talent lies in making a speech, in dashing off an editorial, in
composing a pamphlet, and in drawing up reports in more or less pompous
and dogmatic style; the genre admitted, a few of them who are gifted
become eloquent, but that is all. Among those are the lawyers, notaries,
bailiffs and former petty provincial judges and attorneys who furnish
the leading actors and two-thirds of the members of the Legislative
Assembly and of the Convention: There are surgeons and doctors in small
towns, like Bo, Levasseur, and Baudot, second and third-rate literary
characters, like Barrere, 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 Fouche, capuchins
like Chabot, more or less secularized priests like Lebon, Chasles,
Lakanal, and Gregoire, students scarcely out of school like St.
Just, Monet of Strasbourg, Rousseline of St. Albin, and Julien of the
Drome--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 Chalier 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
imagin