If the Breton aristocrat of ’93 was fearless, intrepid, and without mercy in defence of God and the King—­and his qualities were all shared, the democrat may love to remember, by the Breton peasant, whether peasant follower or peasant leader—­the Jacobin was just as vigorous, as intrepid, as merciless in defence of his Republic.  “Pays, Patrie,” says Victor Hugo, in words which perhaps will serve to describe many a future passage in French history, “ces deux mots resument toute la guerre de Vendee; querelle de l’idee locale centre l’idee universelle; paysans contre patriotes” (ii. 22).[1] Certainly the Jacobins were the patriots of that era, the deliverers of France from something like that process of partition which further east was consummated in this very ’93.  We do not mean the handful of odious miscreants who played fool and demon in turns in the insurrectionary Commune and elsewhere:  such men as Collot d’Herbois, or Carrier, or Panis.  The normal Jacobin was a remarkable type.  He has been excellently described by Louis Blanc as something powerful, original, sombre; half agitator and half statesman; half puritan and half monk half inquisitor and half tribune.  These words of the historian are the exact prose version of the figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin of the poet.  “Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but sombre.  He had in him the absolute.  He had been a priest and that is a serious thing.  Man, like the sky, may have a dark serenity; it is enough that something should have brought night into his soul.  Priesthood had brought night into Cimourdain.  He who has been a priest is one still.  What brings night upon us may leave the stars with us.  Cimourdain was full of virtues, full of truths, but they shone in the midst of darkness” (i. 123).  If the aristocrat had rigidity, so had the Jacobin.  “Cimourdain had the blind certitude of the arrow, which only sees the mark and makes for it.  In revolution, nothing so formidable as the straight line.  Cimourdain strode forward with fatality in his step.  He believed that in social genesis the very extreme point must always be solid ground, an error peculiar to minds that for reason substitute logic” (i. 127).  And so forth, until the character of the Jacobin lives for us with a precision, a fulness, a naturalness, such as neither Carlyle nor Michelet nor Quinet has been able to clothe it with, though these too have the sacred illumination of genius.  Victor Hugo’s Jacobin is a poetic creation, yet the creation only lies in the vivid completeness with which the imagination of a great master has realised to itself the traits and life of an actual personality.  It is not that he has any special love for his Jacobin, but that he has the poet’s eye for types, politics apart.  He sees how much the aristocrat, slaying hip and thigh for the King, and the Jacobin, slaying hip and thigh for the Republic, resembled one another.  “Let us confess,” he says, “these two men, the Marquis and the priest [Lantenac and Cimourdain], were up to a certain point the self-same man.  The bronze mask of civil war has two profiles, one turned towards the past, the other towards the future, but as tragic the one as the other.  Lantenac was the first of these profiles, Cimourdain was the second; only the bitter rictus of Lantenac was covered with shadow and night, and on the fatal brow of Cimourdain was a gleaming of the dawn” (ii. 91).