United States or Saint Vincent and the Grenadines ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
“That Jacobin!” Doña Rita was immensely surprised, as she might well have been. Then resigned to the incomprehensible: “Yes,” she breathed out, “what did you do with him?” “I put him to bed in the studio.” How lovely she was with the effort of close attention depicted in the turn of her head and in her whole face honestly trying to approve. “And then?” she inquired.
The First Consul was at that stage of his greatness when he sought to employ in his service all such talent as the Revolution had made manifest, provided only that it was not stained with notorious bloodshed, or too strongly associated with the Jacobin clubs.
Napoleon had by this time come to be anything but a Jacobin in his political sentiments: his habits of command; his experience of the narrow and ignorant management of the Directory; his personal intercourse with the ministers of sovereign powers; his sense daily strengthened by events, that whatever good was done in Italy proceeded from his own skill and the devotion of his army, all these circumstances conspired to make him respect himself and contemn the government, almost in despite of which he had conquered kingdoms for France.
The Romans did not kill Tarquin; the Romans had a well ordered republic and good laws; they had neither a Jacobin club nor a revolutionary tribunal. We live in a time of anarchy. Tigers wish for my head; I will not give it them." "Citizen general," said Camus then, "will you obey the decree of the national convention, and repair to Paris?" "Not at present."
We could, we think, also show that the evils produced by the Jacobin administration did not terminate when it fell; that it bequeathed a long series of calamities to France and to Europe; that public opinion, which had during two generations been constantly becoming more and more favourable to civil and religious freedom, underwent, during the days of Terror, a change of which the traces are still to be distinctly perceived.
Seductive Jacobin figments, which he had often refuted at the Speculative, swam up in his mind and startled him as with voices: and he seemed to himself to walk accompanied by an almost tangible presence of new beliefs and duties. On the named morning he was at the place of execution. He saw the fleering rabble, the flinching wretch produced.
In a speech at the Jacobin Club at Quesnoy, on the 20th of November, 1792, he made a motion "That, throughout the whole republican army, all hats should be prohibited, and red caps substituted in their place; and that, not only portable guillotines, but portable Jacobin clubs, should accompany the soldiers of Liberty and Equality."
But the honourable gentleman, arguing from experience of human nature, tells us that Jacobin principles are such, that the mind that is once infected with them, no quarantine, no cure can cleanse. Now if this be the case, and that there are, according to Mr. Burke's statement, eighty thousand incorrigible Jacobins in England, we are in a melancholy situation.
Yet in England to-day we hear "the decline of Parliament" talked about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians Mr. Balfour, for instance and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a revival of the power of the Crown.
For half an hour he deliberated what he should do if chosen. If defeated, he would be execrated by all coming generations, while victory would be almost odious. How could he deliberately become the scapegoat of so many crimes to which he had been an utter stranger? Why go as an avowed Jacobin and in a few hours swell the list of names uttered with horror?
Word Of The Day