The new habit of the Directory is so charmingly fancied, that it is impossible not to fall in love with so well-dressed a Constitution;--the costume of the sans-culotte Constitution of 1793 was absolutely insufferable.
Edmund Burke: “The new habit of the Directory is so charmingly fancied, that it is impossible not to fall in love with so well-dressed…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke critiques the superficiality of the new revolutionary government’s appearance.
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We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.
As he is not to obey us, but we are to obey the law in him, our Constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible.
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…





