remains is not very savoury: police operations, proscriptions, and sittings of servile courts of law. The employment of the force of the State against the vanquished shocks us all the more because so many of the coryphées of the Revolution were soon to be distinguished among the servants of Napoleon, and to employ the same police zeal on behalf of the Emperor as they did on behalf of the Terror. In a country which had been convulsed by so many changes of Government, and which consequently had known so many recantations, political justice had something particularly odious about it, because the criminal of to-day might become the judge of to-morrow: General Malet could say before the council of war which condemned him in 1812 that had he succeeded he would have had for his accomplices the whole of France and his judges themselves.[1]
It is useless to carry these reflections any further; the slightest observation will suffice to show that proletarian violence recalls a mass of painful memories of those past times: instinctively, people start thinking of the committees of revolutionary inspection, of the brutalities of suspicious agents, coarsened and frightened by fear, of the tragedies of the guillotine. You understand, therefore, why Parliamentary Socialists make such great efforts to persuade the public that they have the souls of sensitive shepherds, that their hearts are overflowing with good feeling, and that they have only one passion—hatred of violence. They would readily give themselves out to be the protectors of the middle class
- ↑ Ernest Hamel, Histoire de la conspiration du général Malet, p. 241. According to some newspapers, Jaurès, in his evidence before the Court of Assizes of the Seine on June 5, 1907, in the Bousquet-Lévy trial, said that the police officers would show more consideration for the accused, Bousquet, when he had become a legislator. [Bousquet was the secretary of the bakers' syndicate, with whom the police dealt rather harshly. As he was a good orator Jaurès looked upon him as a future deputy.—Trans. Note.]
