?"

Were all these the ideas of Mirabeau, or were they, like the other
document of the Illuminati found amongst his papers, the programme of a
conspiracy? I incline to the latter theory. The plan of campaign was, at
any rate, the one followed out by the conspirators, as Chamfort, the
friend and confidant of Mirabeau, admitted in his conversation with
Marmontel:

The nation is a great herd that only thinks of browsing, and with
good sheepdogs the shepherds can lead it as they please.... Money
and the hope of plunder are all-powerful with the people....
Mirabeau cheerfully asserts that with 100 louis one can make quite
a good riot.[616]

Another contemporary thus describes the methods of the leaders:

Mirabeau, in the exuberance of an orgy, cried one day: "That
_canaille_ well deserves to have us for legislators!" These
professions of faith, as we see, are not at all democratic; the
sect uses the populace as revolution fodder [_chair a revolution_],
as prime material for brigandage, after which it seizes the gold
and abandons generations to torture. It is veritably the code of
hell.[617]

It is this "code of hell" set forth in the "Projet de Revolution" that
we shall find repeated in succeeding documents throughout the last
hundred years--in the correspondence of the "Alta Vendita," in the
_Dialogues aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu_ by Maurice Joly,
in the Revolutionary Catechism of Bakunin, in the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, and in the writings of the Russian Bolsheviks to-day.

Whatever doubts may be cast on the authenticity of any of these
documents, the indisputable fact thus remains that as early as 1789 this
Machiavellian plan of engineering revolution and using the people as a
lever for raising a tyrannical minority to power, had been formulated;
further, that the methods described in this earliest "Protocol" have
been carried out according to plan from that day to this. And in every
outbreak of the social revolution the authors of the movement have been
known to be connected with secret societies.

It was Adrien Duport, author of the "Great Fear" that spread over France
on July 22, 1789, Duport, the inner initiate of the secret societies,
"holding in his hands all the threads of the masonic conspiracy," who on
May 21, 1790, set forth before the Committee of Propaganda the vast
scheme of destruction.

M. de Mirabeau has well e