Or, if at the expiration of this national dictatorship, the nation, well governed and guided, found it dangerous or useless to re-establish the throne, what prevented it from saying, I now assume as a definitive government that which I assumed as a dictatorship:  I proclaim the French republic as the only government befitting the excitement and energy of a regenerative epoch; for the republic is a dictatorship perpetuated and constituted by the people.  What avails a throne?  I remain erect:  it is the attitude of a people in travail!

In a word, the Constituent Assembly, whose light illumined the globe—­whose audacity in two years transformed an empire, had but one fault, that of coming to a close.  It should have perpetuated itself:  it abdicated.  A nation that abdicates after a reign of two years, and on heaps of ruins, bequeaths the sceptre to anarchy.  The king could reign no longer, the nation would not.  Thus faction reigned, and the Revolution perished; not because it had gone too far, but because it had not been sufficiently bold.  So true is it that the timidity of nations is not less disastrous than the weakness of kings; and that a people who knows not how to seize and guard all that which pertains to it, falls at once into tyranny and anarchy.  The Assembly dared to do every thing save to reign:  the reign of the Revolution was nought but a republic:  and the Assembly left this name to factions, and this form to terror.  Such was its fault—­it expiated it:  and the expiation is not yet ended for France.

BOOK VIII.

I.

Whilst the king, isolated at the summit of the constitution, sought support, sometimes by hazardous negotiations with foreigners, sometimes by rash attempts at corruption in the capital, a body, some Girondists and other Jacobins, but as yet confounded under the common denomination of patriots, began to unite and form the nucleus of a great republican idea:  they were Petion, Robespierre, Brissot, Buzot, Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonne, Carra, Louvet, Ducos, Fonfrede, Duperret, Sillery-Genlis, and many others, whose names have scarcely emerged from obscurity.  The home of a young woman, daughter of an engraver of the Quai des Orfevres, was the meeting place of this union.  It was there that the two great parties of the Gironde and the Montagne assembled, united, separated, and after having acquired power, and overturned the monarchy in company, tore the bosom of their country with their dissensions, and destroyed liberty whilst they destroyed each other.  It was neither ambition, nor fortune, nor celebrity which had successively attracted these men to this woman’s residence, then without credit, name, or comforts:  it was conformity of opinion; it was that devoted worship which chosen spirits like to render in secret as in public to a new truth which promises happiness to mankind; it was the invisible attraction of a common faith, that communion of the first neophytes in the religion of philosophy, where the necessity for souls to unite before they associate by deeds, is felt.  So long as the thoughts common to political men have not reached that point where they become fruitful, and are organised by contact, nothing is accomplished.  Revolutions are ideas, and it is this communion which creates parties.