es. But as
the people are a lever which legislators can move at their will, we
must necessarily use them as a support, and render hateful to them
everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path; we
must also buy all the mercenary pens which propagate our methods
and which will instruct the people concerning their enemies whom we
attack. The clergy, being the most powerful through public opinion,
can only be destroyed by ridiculing religion, rendering its
ministers odious, and only representing them as hypocritical
monsters, for Mahomet in order to establish his religion first
defamed the paganism which the Arabs, the Sarmathes, and the
Scythians professed. Libels must at every moment show fresh traces
of hatred against the clergy. To exaggerate their riches, to make
the sins of an individual appear to be common to all, to attribute
to them all vices; calumny, murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is
permitted in times of revolution.

We must degrade the _noblesse_ and attribute it to an odious
origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but
which will flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most
obstinate, burn and destroy their property in order to intimidate
the rest, so that if we cannot entirely destroy this prejudice we
can weaken it and the people will avenge their vanity and their
jealousy by all the excesses which will bring them to submission.

After describing how the soldiers are to be seduced from their
allegiance, and the magistrates represented to the people as despots,
"since the people, brutal and ignorant, only see the evil and never the
good of things," the writer explains they must be given only limited
power in the municipalities.

Let us beware above all of giving them too much force; their
despotism is too dangerous, we must flatter the people by
gratuitous justice, promise them a great diminution in taxes and a
more equal division, more extension in fortunes, and less
humiliation. These phantasies [_vertiges_] will fanaticise the
people, who will flatten out all resistance. What matter the
victims and their numbers? spoliations, destructions, burnings, and
all the necessary effects of a revolution? nothing must be sacred
and we can say with Machiavelli: "What matter the means as long as
one arrives at the end