accuses the author of the Vieux Cordelier of forgetting the conspiracies, the treasons, the corruptions, and all the dreams with which the Terrorists fed their infatuated imaginations; he is even ironical enough to speak of "free France!" and he brings forth this sentence, worthy of a Jacobin pupil of Joseph Prudhomme: "The knife of Desmoulins was chiselled with an incomparable art; but he planted it in the heart of the Revolution."[1] When Robespierre no longer commands the majority in the Convention he is, as a matter of course, put to death by the other Terrorists, in virtue of the legitimate working of the Parliamentary institutions of that time; but to appeal to mere public opinion against the Government leaders, that was the "crime" of Desmoulins. His crime was also that committed by Jaurès at the time he defended Dreyfus against the great leaders of the army and the Government; how many times has not Jaurès been accused of compromising the national defence? But that time is already a long way off; and our orator at that period, not having yet tasted the advantages of power, did not possess a theory of the State as ferocious as that which he possesses to-day.
I think that I have said sufficient to enable me to conclude that if by chance our Parliamentary Socialists get possession of the reins of Government, they will prove to be worthy successors of the Inquisition, of the Old Régime, and of Robespierre; political courts will be at work on a large scale, and we may even suppose that the unfortunate law of 1848, which abolished the death penalty in political matters, will be repealed. Thanks to this reform, we might again see the State triumphing by the hand of the executioner.
Proletarian acts of violence have no resemblance to these proscriptions; they are purely and simply acts of war;
- ↑ J. Jaurès, op. cit. p. 1731.
