书城公版The Origins of Contemporary France
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第787章

"Education,[146] " says another contemporary, "amiable qualities, gentle ways, a mild physiognomy, bodily graces, a cultivated mind, all natural endowments are henceforth the inevitable causes of proscription."One is self-condemned if one has not converted oneself into a sans-culotte and proletarian, in accordance with affected modes, air, language and dress. Hence,"through a hypocritical contest hitherto unknown men who were not vicious deemed it necessary to appear so."And worse still,"one was even afraid to be oneself; one changed one's name, one went in disguise, wearing a vulgar and tasteless attire; everybody shrunk from being what he was."For, according to the Jacobin program, all Frenchmen must be recast[147] in one uniform mold; they must be taken when small; all must be subject to the same enforced education, that of a mechanic, rustic and soldier's boy. Be warned, ye adults, by the guillotine, reform yourselves beforehand according to the prescribed pattern! No more costly, elegant or delicate crystal or gold vases! All are shattered or are still being shattered. Henceforth, only common ware is to be tolerated or ordered to be made, all alike in substance, shape and color, manufactured by thousands at wholesale and in public factories, for the common and plain uses of rural and military life;all original and superior forms are to be rejected.

"The masters of the day," writes Daunou,[148] "deliberately aimed their sword thrusts at superior talent, at energetic characters; they mowed down as well as they could in so short a time, the flower and hope of the nation."In this respect they were consistent; equality-socialism[149] allows none but automatic citizens, mere tools in the hands of the State, all alike, of a rudimentary fashion and easily managed, without personal conscience, spontaneity, curiosity or integrity; whoever has cultivated himself, whoever has thought for himself and exercised his own will and judgment rises above the level and shakes off the yoke;to obtain consideration, to be intelligent and honorable, to belong to the élite, is to be anti-revolutionary. In the popular club of Bourg-en-Bresse,[150] Representative Javogues declared that,"the Republic could be established only on the corpse of the last of the respectable men."X. The Governors and the Governed.

Prisoners in the rue de Sévres and the "Croix-Rouge" revolutionary committee. - The young Dauphin and Simon his preceptor. - Judges, and those under their jurisdiction. - Trenchard and Coffinhal, Lavoisier and André Chénier.

Here we have, on one side, the élite of France, almost every person of rank, fortune, family, and merit, those eminent for intelligence, culture, talent and virtue, all deprived of common rights, in exile, in prison, under pikes, and on the scaffold. On the other side, those above common law, possessing every office and omnipotent in the irresponsible dictatorship, in the despotic proconsulships, in the sovereignty of justice, a horde of the outcasts of all classes, the parvenus of fanaticism, charlatani**, imbecility and crime. Often, when these personalities meet, one sees the contrast between the governed and the governors in such strong relief that one almost regards it as calculated and arranged beforehand; the colors and brush of the painter, rather than words, are necessary to represent it. In the western section of Paris, in the prisons of the rue de Sévres[151]

the prisoners consist of the most distinguished personages of the Quartier Saint Germain, prelates, officers, grand-seigniors, and noble ladies, - - Monseigneur de Clermont-Tonnerre, Monseigneur de Crussol d'Amboise, Monseigneur de Hersaint, Monseigneur de Saint Simon, bishop of Agde, the Comtesse de Narbonne-Pelet, the Duchesse de Choiseul, the Princesse de Chimay, the Comtesse de Raymond-Narbonne and her daughter, two years of age, in short, the flower of that refined society which Europe admired and imitated and which, in its exquisite perfection, equalled or surpassed all that Greece, Rome and Italy had produced in brilliancy, polish and amiability. Contrast with these the arbiters of their lives and deaths, the potentates of the same quarter who issue the warrants of arrest against them, who pen them in to speculate on them, and who revel at their expense and before their eyes: these consist of the members of the revolutionary committee of the Croix-Rouge, the eighteen convicted rogues and debauchees previously described,[152] ex-cab-drivers, porters, cobblers, street-messengers, stevedores, bankrupts, counterfeiters, former or future jail-birds, all clients of the police or alms-house riff-raff. - At the other end of Paris, in the east, in the tower of the Temple, separated from his sister and torn from his mother, still lives the little Dauphin: no one in France merits more pity or respect than him.