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Updated: June 7, 2025
Then, we'll go to the Opera. We'll get in with the hired applauders. The Opera claque is well managed. I wouldn't associate with the claque on the boulevard. At the Opera, just fancy! some of them pay twenty sous, but they're ninnies. They're called dishclouts. And then we'll go to see the guillotine work. I'll show you the executioner. He lives in the Rue des Marais. Monsieur Sanson.
There has not been one of the great alterations effected by the popular spirit within the last half-century, that was not preceded by professions of contemptuous incredulity, on the part of the applauders of things as they were, toward those who calculated on the effects of that spirit.
Then everybody applauds, as a matter of course, and agrees that it must be so. But if you were to stop them all in the middle of their applause, you would probably find that neither the speaker nor his applauders could tell you how or in what way it was so; neither the one nor the other having the slightest idea of what they mean when they speak of the "Baconian philosophy."
The Greeks have an appropriate name in their language for this sort of people, importing that they are applauders by profession, and we stigmatize them with the opprobrious title of table-flatterers: yet the dirty business alluded to increases every day.
This same emotional contagion is, of course, the psychologic basis for the French system of the claque, or band of hired applauders seated in the centre of the house. The leader of the claque knows his cues as if he were an actor in the piece, and at the psychologic moment the claqueurs burst forth with their clatter and start the house applauding.
Give the sore-headed, politically gangrened, conscienceless, virtueless, Godless applauders of Tom Paine what they ask, and it will simply amount to abandoning our posterity to the lowest, vilest sensualism known in Pagan geography along the line or borderland of a foul lust-gratifying, brutalizing hell.
We can hardly have a surer sign of a man's fundamental sincerity than that his first triumph, the first revelation to him of his power, instead of seducing him to frequent the mischievous and disturbing circle of his applauders, should throw him inwards upon himself and his own principles with new earnestness and refreshed independence.
* Robespierre lay for some hours in one of the committee-rooms, writhing with the pain of his wound, and abandoned to despair; while many of his colleagues, perhaps those who had been the particular agents and applauders of his crimes, passed and repassed him, glorying and jesting at his sufferings.
Sulpice heard again the applause that he received. He saw those devoted hands reached out to him as he descended from the tribune; he again experienced a feeling of pride, and yet he felt dissatisfied with himself now that he saw the other hands, the servile hands of the applauders, hidden by the red, cold hands of a mason who held this speech between his horny fingers.
And that we are to hope better of all these supposed sects and schisms, and that we shall not need that solicitude, honest perhaps, though over-timorous, of them that vex in this behalf, but shall laugh in the end at those malicious applauders of our differences, I have these reasons to persuade me.
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