196 Chapter IX
was the Marquis de Chastellux, who had been a major- general in Rochambeau’s
army, and who, having written a little tract De la félicité publique, was no enemy of
the human race.
But in France, unlike Germany, the American Dream could not be kept down.
There were too many who preferred dreams to reality. Brissot affords an excellent
example. The French Revolution was to make him famous; he was to be the virtual
head of the French government in 1792, and the man who more than anyone else
took France into war with Europe. Before 1789 he was one of the not very numer-
ous people in France who were already true revolutionaries. He was outraged at
Chastellux’ attempt to moderate the excitement over America. “You wish, sir, to
destroy this enchantment!” he cried. “Cruel man! Even if it were an illusion would
you still dissipate it? It would be dear to us, it would be useful in consoling the
man of virtue... .”^33
Brissot was a man with whom recent generations have been unable to feel very
much sympathy, since he appeals neither to liberal constitutionalists, nor to con-
servatives, nor to modern revolutionaries who think him a petty bourgeois, nor to
those who credit the Jacobins of the Terror with at least trying to save France from
the consequences of Girondist folly. He was, if there be such a thing, a pure and
natural radical. “You have a poor idea of my judgment,” he wrote in 1780 to a
friend who urged that change must build on existing practice, “if you think I would
prefer to accept present- day practice, which I know too well. However monstrous
the new theories may be, they will never equal practice in absurdity and atrocity.”^34
And he thought the good fortune of America to be that drastic change could occur
there: “O hundred times happy America where this reform can be executed to the
foundations in every part!”
He lived in the shadowy world of political hacks and hired pamphleteers in
which he had connections with the somewhat disreputable Mirabeau; but after
Philip Mazzei met him, and incidentally found him living in two rooms with his
children in rags, he was warned by Marmontel that Brissot “was someone to stay
away from.” Brissot took up all sorts of causes, not necessarily consistent. He
founded the first French antislavery society. He has been called an early pre-
socialist, and credited with the idea that property is theft; but he was also involved
in speculation in Ohio River lands, and with this in mind made a trip to the United
States, where he was glad to conclude that American debts would probably be paid
in hard money. He still loved American virtue, but found the bosoms of ladies in
New York surprisingly bare, and the custom of cigar- smoking revolting. As early as
1787 he sketched out a kind of plan of revolution, which he hoped to carry into
effect through connections with the duke of Orleans. The plan was to organize a
strong party—the trouble with revolutionary parties in Holland and Belgium, said
Brissot, was that they did not know what they wanted—and then to exploit the
dissensions between the Parlement of Paris and the King’s government, to make
loud demands for the Estates- General, and hold out the idea of a constitution as a
rallying point. It would then be possible to “free the people and immortalize
33 J. B. Brissot de Warville, Examen critique des Voyages de M. de Chastellux (London, 1786), 19.
34 J. B. Brissot, Correspondance et papiers (Paris, 1912), 18.