All educated men were persecuted," he states a
month after Thermidor 9;[141] "to have acquaintances, to be literary,
sufficed for arrest, as an aristocrat. . . . Robespierre . . .
with devilish ingenuity, abused, calumniated and overwhelmed with gall
and bitterness all who were devoted to serious studies, all who
professed extensive knowledge; . . . he felt that cultivated men
would never bend the knee to him [142]. . . . . Instruction was
paralyzed; they wanted to burn the libraries . . . . . Must I
tell you that at the very door of your assembly errors in orthography
are seen? Nobody learns how to read or write." - At Nantes, Carrier
boasts of having "dispersed the literary chambers," while in his
enumeration of the evil-minded he adds "to the rich and merchants,"
"all gens d'esprit."[143] Sometimes on the turnkey's register we read
that such an one was confined "for being clever and able to do
mischief," another for saying "good-day, gentlemen, to the municipal
councillors."[144]
Politeness has, like other signs of a good education, become a stigma;
good manners are considered, not only as a remnant of the ancient
r?gime, but as a revolt against the new institutions; now, as the
governing principle of these is, theoretically, abstract equality and,
practically, the ascendancy of the low class, one rebels against the
established order of things when one repudiates coarse companions,
familiar oaths, and the indecent expressions of the common workman and
the soldier.
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