348 Chapter XV
constitution,” he wrote to Madison in November.^1 He was having discussions with
Lafayette about a French declaration of rights, but such ideas were now by no
means unusual in Paris. The Americanized Mazzei was less cautious than Jeffer-
son, but far more so than Dupont or Condorcet. The Americanized Lafayette was
already being called an “aristocrat,” still in a friendly way, by Condorcet, Mirabeau,
and the Abbé Sieyès.
The devil himself is now posing as an American, said Condorcet to Mazzei;
“the devil of aristocracy,” disguised as a wise and prudent citizen of the New
World, was tempting the French with his plausible arguments. Actually, as always,
the devil was false. You wise Americans, Condorcet told Mazzei, never had any
respect for old abuses such as ours. “You had no ambitious, hypocritical and im-
mensely wealthy clergy calling itself an order in the state,” no nobility as a second
order, no insidious tax exempt interests, no self- perpetuating tribunals executing
an absurd jurisprudence and holding a veto over the lawmaking power, no vicious
system of tax collection “tied to the pretensions of your orders and your bodies of
magistrates.”
You moderate Americans, said Condorcet, would not have tolerated such condi-
tions any more than we will. Mazzei agreed in principle, but sagely observed that
it was not possible to destroy everything at once.
“Who ever talked of destroying everything at once?” retorted Condorcet. What
the French wanted, he said, was to avoid giving a new lease of life, a new formal
sanction, to the old institutions. “And this is what the aristocratic spirit that is
dominant today will bring about.” If the aristocratic spirit prevailed, he thought,
even gradual abolition of the old evils would never be possible.^2
In this chapter, instead of attempting the hopeless task of a full and rounded
account of the French Revolution, for which there is no room and probably no
need, I shall select a few points for more detailed treatment: how the year 1789
opened with a fully developed revolutionary psychology, what the Revolution es-
sentially consisted in, and why the French Revolution, though inspired by much
the same principles as the American, adopted different constitutional forms and
took on a magnitude unknown to the upheavals of Western Civilization since the
time of the Protestant Reformation.
The Formation of a Revolutionary Psychology
Great revolutions are not made by professional revolutionists, nor are they mani-
festations of abnormal psychology in any ordinary meaning of the word. Later on,
when the revolution is under way, both professionals and abnormal types (which
need not be the same) may seize positions of power. But the revolution occurs, in
the first place, when men who are ordinarily unexcited by politics, generally mod-
erate, and engaged in their own private affairs, are drawn into revolution as a
1 Papers of Thomas Jefferson, XIV (Princeton, 1958), 188; my article, “The Dubious Democrat:
Thomas Jefferson in Bourbon France,” Political Science Quarterly, LX XII (1957), 388–404.
2 R. Ciampini, Lettere di Filippo Mazzei alla corte di Polonia (Bologna, 1937), 17, 53–56.