Historical voices

The present, by destroying and altering everything, will leave to their successors apparently nothing popular to do.

Their idea of their powers is always taken at the utmost stretch of legislative competency, and their examples for common cases from the exceptions of the most urgent necessity.

We see a body without fundamental laws, without established maxims, without respected rules of proceeding, which nothing can keep firm to any system whatsoever.

Passing from the civil creating and the civil cementing principles of this Constitution to the National Assembly, which is to appear and act as sovereign, we see a body in its constitution with every possible power and no possible external…

In that general territory itself, as in the old name of Provinces, the citizens are interested from old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on account of the geometric properties of its figure.

Perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards by which alone men come to be affected, as with their own concern, in the prosperity of a kingdom so extensive as that of France.

The love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality.

Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country, in which the heart found something which it could fill.

We pass on to our neighborhoods, and our habitual provincial connections.

We begin our public affections in our families.

But, instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country.

To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength of Paris, thus formed, will appear a system of general weakness.

Paris is compact; she has an enormous strength, wholly disproportioned to the force of any of the square republics; and this strength is collected and condensed within a narrow compass.

It is through the power of Paris, now become the centre and focus of jobbing, that the leaders of this faction direct, or rather command, the whole legislative and the whole executive government.

Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men.

Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of those who mean to form them for civil or military action.

It is obvious, that, in the towns, all the things which conspire against the country-gentleman combine in favor of the money manager and director.

The country-gentleman, therefore, the officer by sea and land, the man of liberal views and habits, attached to no profession, will be as completely excluded from the government of his country as if he were legislatively proscribed.

He augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must take to contend with him.

Hope, fear, alarm, jealousy, the ephemerous tale that does its business and dies in a day, all these things, which are the reins and spurs by which leaders check or urge the minds of followers, are not easily employed, or hardly at all…

Combine them by all the art you can, and all the industry, they are always dissolving into individuality.

The very nature of a country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the occupations and all the pleasures they afford, render combination and arrangement (the sole way of procuring and exerting influence) in a manner impossible…

The landed gentleman, the yeoman, and the peasant have, none of them, habits or inclinations or experience which can lead them to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in France.

The whole of the power obtained by this Revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers, and the moneyed directors who lead them.