TJic First French Republic 455 One difference between monarchy and a republic, which would alone serve to make every right-hearted man reject mon- archy with horror and give preference to a republic, whatever it may cost to establish it, is that although the people may, in a democracy, be misled, they always esteem virtue and try to place only the upright in office, while rogues constitute the very essence of monarchy. Vice, pillage, and crime are diseases in republics, but health itself is a disease in mon- archies. Cardinal Richelieu admits this in his Political Testa- ment^ where he makes it a principle that the king should avoid employing upright men. And before him Sallust said, " Kings cannot do without scoundrels and, on the contrary, they must be on their guard against probity." Only in a republic, then, can the good citizen ever hope to see an end to the supremacy of intrigue and crime, for in order that these may disappear it is only necessary that the people should be enlightened. . . . And there is another difference between monarchy and a republic: the reigns of the worst of emperors — Tibe- rius, Claudius, Nero, Caligula, Domitian — all had happy beginnings. It is by reflections such as these that the patriot should first answer the royalist who is laughing in his sleeve over the present state of France, as if this violent and terrible condition was to last. I can hear you, my dear royalists, slyly making sport of the founders of the republic and com- paring the present with the old days of the Bastile. You count on the frankness of my pen, and you think that you will follow with pleasure my faithful account of the past half year. But I know how to moderate your satisfaction, and at the same time animate the citizens to new courage. Before summoning my readers to the Place de la Re'volution and showing it to them flooded with the blood that has flowed during the past six months for the eternal emancipation of a nation of twenty-five millions and not yet cleansed by liberty and the public welfare, I will begin by fixing the eyes 416. Camille Desmoulins seeks to extenuate the Reign oi Terror by quotations from Tacitus. 1 See above, pp. 268 sqq.
