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Updated: May 15, 2025
When men gratify their ambition by means so sanguinary and atrocious as those resorted to by the Brissotines, we are authorized in concluding they will not be more scrupulous in the use or preservation of power, than they were in attaining it; and we can have no doubt but that the fomenting or suppressing the progress of civil discord, was, with them, a mere question of expediency.
Disaffection, therefore, continued to increase, and the Brissotines are suspected of having rather fostered than repressed these intestine commotions,* for the same purpose which induced them to provoke the war with England, and to extend that of the Continent.
What is this moral pestilence which has introduced into our armies false ideas of humanity? That the English were to be treated with indulgence was the philanthropic notion of the Brissotines; it was the patriotic practice of Dumourier. But humanity consists in exterminating our enemies. No mercy to the execrable Englishman.
His local knowledge, active disposition, and subservient industry, render him an useful kind of drudge to any prevailing party, and, since the overthrow of the Brissotines, he has been entrusted with the government of this and some of the neighbouring departments.
* A former imprisonment of Hebert formed a principal charge against the Brissotines, and, indeed, the one that was most insisted on at their trial, if we except that of having precipitated France into a war with England. It must be difficult for the English Jacobins to decide on this occasion between the virtues of their dead friends and those of their living ones.
When Toulon was taken Barère came forward to announce the event. "The conquest," said the apostate Brissotine, "won by the Mountain over the Brissotines must be commemorated by a mark set on the place where Toulon once stood. The national thunder must crush the house of every trader in the town."
But a deep and broad gulf separated the representative body into two great parties. On one side were those statesmen who are called, from the name of the department which some of them represented, the Girondists, and, from the name of one of their most conspicuous leaders, the Brissotines. In activity and practical ability, Brissot and Gensonne were the most conspicuous among them.
The monstrous powers claimed for the Convention by the Brissotines,* with the hope of exclusively exercising them, were fatal to themselves the party that overthrew the Brissotines in its turn became insignificant and a small number of them only, under the description of Committees of Public Welfare and General Safety, gradually usurped the whole authority.
When men gratify their ambition by means so sanguinary and atrocious as those resorted to by the Brissotines, we are authorized in concluding they will not be more scrupulous in the use or preservation of power, than they were in attaining it; and we can have no doubt but that the fomenting or suppressing the progress of civil discord, was, with them, a mere question of expediency.
The errors of the Brissotines were undoubtedly neither few nor small; but, when we fairly compare their conduct with the conduct of any other party which acted or suffered during the French Revolution, we are forced to admit their superiority in every quality except that single quality which in such times prevails over every other, decision.
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