A few months after the 9th Thermidor, the Convention being desirous of diffusing throughout the country ideas of order, civilization, and internal prosperity, resolved upon organizing a system of public instruction, but a difficulty arose in finding professors.  The members of the corps of instruction had become officers of artillery, of engineering, or of the staff, and were combating the enemies of France at the frontiers.  Fortunately at this epoch of intellectual exaltation, nothing seemed impossible.  Professors were wanting; it was resolved without delay to create some, and the Normal School sprung into existence.  Fifteen hundred citizens of all ages, despatched from the principal district towns, assembled together, not to study in all their ramifications the different branches of human knowledge, but in order to learn the art of teaching under the greatest masters.

Fourier was one of these fifteen hundred pupils.  It will, no doubt, excite some surprise that he was elected at St. Florentine, and that Auxerre appeared insensible to the honour of being represented at Paris by the most illustrious of her children.  But this indifference will be readily understood.  The elaborate scaffolding of calumny which it has served to support will fall to the ground as soon as I recall to mind, that after the 9th Thermidor the capital, and especially the provinces, became a prey to a blind and disorderly reaction, as all political reactions invariably are; that crime (the crime of having changed opinions—­it was nothing less hideous) usurped the place of justice; that excellent citizens, that pure, moderate, and conscientious patriots were daily massacred by hired bands of assassins in presence of whom the inhabitants remained mute with fear.  Such are, Gentlemen, the formidable influences which for a moment deprived Fourier of the suffrages of his countrymen; and caricatured, as a partisan of Robespierre, the individual whom St. Just, making allusion to his sweet and persuasive eloquence, styled a patriot in music; who was so often thrown into prison by the decemvirs; who, at the very height of the Reign of Terror, offered before the Revolutionary Tribunal the assistance of his admirable talents to the mother of Marshal Davoust, accused of the crime of having at that unrelenting epoch sent some money to the emigrants; who had the incredible boldness to shut up at the inn of Tonnerre an agent of the Committee of Public Safety, into the secret of whose mission he penetrated, and thus obtained time to warn an honourable citizen that he was about to be arrested; who, finally, attaching himself personally to the sanguinary proconsul before whom every one trembled in Yonne, made him pass for a madman, and obtained his recall!  You see, Gentlemen, some of the acts of patriotism, of devotion, and of humanity which signalized the early years of Fourier.  They were, you have seen, repaid with ingratitude.  But ought we in reality to be astonished at it?  To expect gratitude from the man who cannot make an avowal of his feelings without danger, would be to shut one’s eyes to the frailty of human nature, and to expose one’s self to frequent disappointments.