United States or China ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The English reader will draw from this work of Brissot, and from the result of the last struggles of this party, some useful lessons. He will be enabled to judge of the information of those who have undertaken to guide and enlighten us, and who, for reasons best known to themselves, have chosen to paint the French Revolution and its consequences in brilliant and flattering colors.
No man can object to him as a royalist: the royal party, and the Christian religion, never had a more determined enemy. In a word, it is BRISSOT. It is Brissot, the republican, the Jacobin, and the philosopher, who is brought to give an account of Jacobinism, and of republicanism, and of philosophy.
They'll be perfectly sure you are the infamous Brissot, the people's enemy; and the good Republicans, filled with horror and loathing at sight of you, will hang you from the nearest lamp-post. You hear me?" The citoyen Blaise, who had been watering his horse, announced that he had arranged the affair, though it was quite plain to everybody that it had been arranged without him.
Probity is the virtue of democrats, for the people look first at the hands of those who govern them. The Girondists, pure as men of the ancient time, feared the shadow of a suspicion of this nature on their characters, and Dumouriez's carelessness on this point annoyed them. They complained. Gensonné and Brissot insinuated their feelings to him on this point at Roland's.
In the first place, the evidence of dates; in the second place, the admission of all the different parties in France; of the friends of Brissot charging on Robespierre the war with this country, and of the friends of Robespierre charging it on Brissot; but both acquitting England; the testimonies of the French Government during the whole interval, since the declaration of Pilnitz, and the date assigned to the pretended treaty of Pavia; the first of which had not the slightest relation to any project of partition or dismemberment; the second of which I firmly believe to be an absolute fabrication and forgery; and in neither of which, even as they are represented, any reason has been assigned for believing that this country had any share.
The map of the Turkish Empire explains what maybe though absurd or nugatory in this assertion. As soon as a war with Austria was resolved on by the Brissot faction in 1792, emissaries were despatched to Constantinople to engage the Divan to invade the provinces of Austria and Russia, thereby to create a diversion in favour of this country.
He thought, and with reason, that party hatred would be more potent than patriotism, and that by flattering the rivalry of Robespierre and Danton against Brissot, Pétion, and Roland, he should find in the Jacobins themselves a support for the government. He liked the king, pitied the queen, and all his prejudices were in favour of the monarchy.
After touring Pennsylvania five years later, Brissot de Warville reported that there existed then a country where the blacks were allowed to have souls, and to be endowed with an understanding capable of being formed to virtue and useful knowledge, and where they were not regarded as beasts of burden in order that their masters might have the privilege of treating them as such.
He determined on making a journey beyond the seas, and thus relieved me from the most serious anxiety which I have experienced in all my life. Brissot died after having covered the walls of Paris with printed handbills in favour of the Bourbon restoration.
Brissot, Gorsas, Carra, Prudhomme, Fréron, Danton, Fauchet, Condorcet, edited democratic journals: they began by demanding the abolition of royalty, "the greatest scourge," said the Revolutions de Paris, "which has ever dishonoured the human species."
Word Of The Day