look upon justice as a weapon which they may use unfairly against their enemies. Parliamentary Socialists do not escape the universal rule; they preserve the old cult of the State; they are therefore prepared to commit all the misdeeds of the Old Régime and of the Revolution.
A fine collection of platitudinous political maxims might be composed by going through Jaurès's Histoire socialiste. I have never had the patience to read the 1824 pages devoted to the story of the Revolution between August 10, 1792, and the fall of Robespierre; I have simply turned over the leaves of this tedious book, and seen that it contained a mixture of a philosophy worthy of M. Pantalon and a policy fitting a purveyor to the guillotine. For a long time I had reckoned that Jaurès would be capable of every ferocity against the vanquished; I saw that I had not been mistaken; but I should not have thought that he was capable of so much platitude: in his eyes the vanquished are always in the wrong, and victory fascinates our great defender of eternal justice so much that he is ready to consent to every proscription demanded of him: "Revolutions," he says, "claim from a man the most frightful sacrifices, not only of his rest, not only of his life, but of human tenderness and pity."[1] Why write so much, then, about the inhumanity of the executioners of Dreyfus? They also sacrificed "human tenderness" to what appeared to them to be the safety of the country.
A few years ago the Republicans were extremely indignant with the Vicomte de Vogüé, who, when receiving Hanotaux into the French Academy, called the coup d'état of 1851 "a somewhat harsh police exploit."[2]
- ↑ J. Jaurès, La Convention, p. 1732.
- ↑ This was on March 24, 1898, at a particularly critical moment of the Dreyfus case, when the Nationalists were asking that agitators and enemies of the army should be swept away. J. Reinach says that De Vogüé openly invited the army to begin again the work of 1850 (Histoire de l'affaire Dreyfus, tome iii. p. 545).
