his conduct and exterior, the dominance of the all-powerful principle which refashions his being and the inflexible logic which controls his thoughts.  This constitutes the final result and complete triumph of the classic spirit.  Installed in narrow brains, incapable of entertaining two related ideas, it is to become a cold or furious monomania, fiercely and unrelentingly destroying a past it curses, and attempting to establish a millennium, and all in the name of an illusory contract, at once anarchical and despotic, which unfetters insurrection and justifies dictatorship; all to end in a conflicting social order resembling sometimes a drunken orgy of demons, and sometimes a Spartan convent; all aimed at replacing the real human being, slowly formed by his past with an improvised robot, who, through its own debility, will collapse when the external and mechanical force that keeps it up will no longer sustain it.

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Notes: 

[1] Barrère, “Point du jour,” No. 1, (June 15, 1789). " You are summoned to give history a fresh start.”

[2] Condorcet, ibid., “Tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain,” the tenth epoch.  “The methods of the mathematical sciences, applied to new objects, have opened new roads to the moral and political sciences.” — Cf.  Rousseau, in the “Contrat Social,” the mathematical calculation of the fraction of sovereignty to which each individual is entitled.

[3] Saint-Lambert, “Catéchisme universel,” the first dialogue, p. 17.

[4] Condorcet, ibid., ninth epoch.  “From this single truth the publicists have been able to derive the rights of man.”

[5] Rousseau still entertained admiration for Montesquieu but, at the same time, with some reservation; afterwards, however, the theory developed itself, every historical right being rejected.  “Then,” says Condorcet, (ibid., ninth epoch), “they found themselves obliged abandon a false and crafty policy which, forgetful of men deriving equal rights through their nature, attempted at one time to estimate those allowed to them according to extent of territory, the temperature of the climate, the national character, the wealth of the population, the degree of perfection of their commerce and industries, and again to apportion the same rights unequally among diverse classes of men, bestowing them on birth, riches and professions, and thus creating opposing interests and opposing powers, for the purpose of subsequently establishing an equilibrium alone rendered necessary by these institutions themselves and which the danger of their tendencies by no means corrects.”

[6] Condillac, “Logique.”

[7] “Histoire de France par Estampes,” 1789. (In the collection of engravings, Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris.)

[8] Mme. de Genlis, “Souvenirs de Félicie,” 371-391.