The principal names discussed in the public newspapers in Paris, were those of Condorcet, Brissot, Danton;—­in the departments, those of Vergniaud, Guadet, Isnard, Louvet,—­who were afterwards Girondists; and those of Thuriot, Merlin, Carnot, Couthon, Danton, Saint Just, who, subsequently united with Robespierre, were, by turns, his instruments or his victims.  Condorcet was a philosopher, as intrepid in his actions as bold in his speculations.  His political creed was a consequence of his philosophy.  He believed in the divinity of reason, and in the omnipotence of the human understanding, with liberty as its handmaid.  Heaven, the abode of all ideal perfections, and in which man places his most beautiful dreams, was limited by Condorcet to earth:  his science was his virtue; the human mind his deity.  The intellect impregnated by science, and multiplied by time, it appeared to him must triumph necessarily over all the resistance of matter; must lay bare all the creative powers of nature, and renew the face of creation.  He had made of this system a line of politics, whose first idea was to adore the future and abhor the past.  He had the cool fanaticism of logic, and the reflective anger of conviction.  A pupil of Voltaire, D’Alembert, and Helvetius, he, like Bailly, was of that intermediate generation by which philosophy was embodied with the Revolution.  More ambitious than Bailly, he had not his impassibility.  Aristocrat by birth, he, like Mirabeau, had passed over to the camp of the people.  Hated by the court, he hated it as do all renegades.  He had become one of the people, in order to convert the people into the army of philosophy.  He wanted of the republic no more than was sufficient to overturn its prejudices.  Ideas once become victorious,—­he would willingly have confided it to the control of a constitutional monarchy.  He was rather a man for dispute than a man of anarchy.  Aristocrats always carry with them, into the popular party, the desire of order and command.  They would fain

  “Ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm.”

Real anarchists are those who are impatient of having always obeyed, and feel themselves impotent to command.  Condorcet had edited the Chronique de Paris from 1789.  It was a journal of constitutional doctrines, but in which the throbbings of anger were perceivable beneath the cool and polished hand of the philosopher.  Had Condorcet been endowed with warmth and command of language, he might have been the Mirabeau of another assembly.  He had his earnestness and constancy, but had not the resounding and energetic tone which made his own soul and feelings felt by another.  The club of electors of Paris, who met at La Sainte Chapelle, elected Condorcet to the chamber.  The same club returned Danton.

XXI.