- Around Couthon, Saint-Just, Billaud, Collot, and
Robespierre, with the exception of certain men devoted, not to
Utopianism but the country, and who, like Carnot, conform to the
system in order to save France, there are but a few sectarians to
carry out the Jacobin program. These are men so short-sighted as not
to clearly comprehend its fallacies, or sufficiently fanatical to
accept its horrors, a lot of social outcasts and self-constituted
statesmen, infatuated through incommensurate faculties with the parts
they play, unsound in mind and superficially educated, wholly
incompetent, boundless in ambition, their consciences perverted,
callous or deadened by sophistry, hardened through arrogance or killed
by crime, by impunity and by success.
Thus, whilst other despots raise a moderate weight, calling around
them either the majority or the flower of the nation, employing the
best strength of the country and lengthening their lever (of
despotism) as much as possible, the Jacobins attempt to raise an
incalculable weight, repel the majority as well as the flower of the
nation, discard the best strength of the country, and shorten their
lever to the utmost.
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