Without fortune and without influence, they had renounced
promotion, fully aware that the higher ranks were reserved for the
heirs of great families and the courtiers at Versailles. After
serving fifteen or twenty years, they returned home with a captain's
commission and the cross of St. Louis, sometimes with a small
pension, contented with having done their duty and conscious of their
own honor. On the approach of the Revolution, this old spirit,
illumined by the new ideas, became an almost civic virtue:[65] we have
seen how they behaved between 1789 and 1792, their moderation, their
forbearance, their sacrifice of self-love, their abnegation and their
stoical impassability, their dislike to strike, the coolness with
which they persisted in receiving without returning blows, and in
maintaining, if not public order, at least the last semblance of it.
Patriots as much as soldiers, through birth, education and conviction,
they formed a natural, special nursery, eminently worthy of
preserving, inasmuch as it furnished society with ready-made
instruments for defense, internally against rascals and brutes, and
externally against the enemy. Less calm in disposition and more given
to pleasure than the rural nobles of Prussia, under slacker discipline
and in the midst of greater worldliness, but more genial, more
courteous and more liberal-minded, the twenty-six thousand noble
families of France upheld in their sons the traditions and prejudices,
the habits and aptitudes, those energies of body, heart and mind[66]
through which the Prussian "junkers" were able to constitute the
Prussian army, organize the German army and make Germany the first
power of Europe.
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