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But he re-awakened critical inquiry; and any inquiry was certain to sap the base of the ancien régime in France. Montesquieu's teaching inspired the group of moderate reformers who in 1789 desired to re-fashion the institutions of France on the model of those of England. But popular sentiment speedily swept past these Anglophils towards the more attractive aims set forth by Voltaire.
"Jesting apart," he continued, "you are spoiling yourself, ruining your preaching, and pulling down a splendid building to re-fashion it into one which sins against the rules of nature and art. You must remember, too, that if at your age, like a piece of cloth, you have taken a wrong fold, it will not be easy to smooth it out."
It is hard to see just how we are to re-fashion this impossible society in terms even nearly approaching the normal and the human. It is universal, and it is accepted by everyone as very splendid and quite the greatest achievement of man.
His object is not merely to do away with a positive faith and suppress social inequality, to proscribe revealed dogmas, hereditary beliefs, an established cult, the supremacy of rank and superiority of fortunes, wealth, leisure, refinement and elegance, but he wants, in addition to all this, to re-fashion the citizen.
The dictator then invoked by the whole of France was obliged to re-establish the greater part of that which had been destroyed. The attempt of the Jacobins to re-fashion society in the name of pure reason constitutes an experiment of the highest interest. Probably mankind will never have occasion to repeat it on so vast a scale.
It is these things that make an age or a nation worthy of existence, and these things are not to be secured by bowing down before the State. It is the individual in whom all that is good must be realized, and the free growth of the individual must be the supreme end of a political system which is to re-fashion the world.
To re-fashion Europe in a cosmopolitan mould he needed a clerical police that was more than merely French. To achieve those grander designs the successor of Cæsar would need the aid of the successor of Peter; and this aid would be granted only to the restorer of Roman Catholicism in France, never to the perpetuator of schism.
But he re-awakened critical inquiry; and any inquiry was certain to sap the base of the ancien régime in France. Montesquieu's teaching inspired the group of moderate reformers who in 1789 desired to re-fashion the institutions of France on the model of those of England. But popular sentiment speedily swept past these Anglophils towards the more attractive aims set forth by Voltaire.
To re-fashion Europe in a cosmopolitan mould he needed a clerical police that was more than merely French. To achieve those grander designs the successor of Cæsar would need the aid of the successor of Peter; and this aid would be granted only to the restorer of Roman Catholicism in France, never to the perpetuator of schism.
Of all the garrisons of the central citadel, whether royalists, Constitutionalists, or Girondins, not one has been able to defend itself, to re-fashion the executive instrument, to draw the sword and use it in the streets: on the first attack, often at the first summons, all have surrendered, and now the citadel, with every other public fortress, is in the hands of the Jacobins.
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