This is all. - Not
twenty avowed or decided royalists could be found in the two
Councils.[52] There are scarcely more than five or six - Imbert-
Colom?s, Pichegru, Willot, Delarne - who may be in correspondence with
Louis XVIII. and disposed to raise the royal flag. For the other
five hundred, the restoration of the legitimate King, or the
establishment of any royalty whatever, is only in the background; they
regard it only at a distance, as a possible accompaniment and remote
consequence of their present undertaking. In any event, they would
accept only "the mitigated monarchy,"[53] that which the Liberals of
1788 hoped for, that which Mounier demanded after the days of October
5 and 6, that advocated by Barnave after the return from Varennes,
that which Malouet, Gouverneur Morris, Mallet-Dupan and all good
observers and wise councillors of France, always recommended. None of
them propose to proclaim divine right and return to aristocratic
feudalism; each proposes to abrogate revolutionary right and destroy
Jacobin feudalism. The principle condemned by them is that which
sustains the theory of anarchy and despotism,
* the application of the Contrat Social,[54]
* a dictatorship established by coups d?tat, carried on arbitrarily
and supported by terror,
* the systematic and dogmatic persistence of assaults on persons,
property and consciences,
* the usurpation of a vicious, fanatical minority which has devastated
France for five years and, under the pretext of everywhere setting up
the rights of man, purposely maintaining a war to propagate its system
abroad.
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