Survival of the Revolution in France 467
ness; some politeness, but more civility. If you compare such a country with
the regions of domination, whether monarchical or aristocratical, you will fancy
yourself in Arcadia or Elysium.The other said:
We want an order of things... in which the arts are an adornment to the liberty
that ennobles them, and commerce the source of wealth for the public and not
of monstrous opulence for a few families.... In our country we desire morality
instead of selfishness, honesty and not mere “honor,” principle and not mere
custom, duty and not mere propriety, the sway of reason rather than the tyranny
of fashion, a scorn for vice and not a contempt for the unfortunate... good
men instead of good company, merit in place of intrigue, talent in place of mere
cleverness, truth and not show, the charm of happiness and not the boredom of
pleasure... in short the virtues and miracles of a republic and not the vices and
absurdities of a monarchy.
The first was written by John Adams in 1776, the second by Maximilien Robes-
pierre in 1794. The pictures in their minds were much alike. Both thought that a
properly drafted constitution (producing what Robespierre, but not Adams, called
a “democracy”) would do much to bring such a world about.^32
The difference was not so much in the main idea as in the action that they were
prepared to take. Adams already lived in a kind of Arcadia, as contrasted, at least,
with Europe. Robespierre did not. No doubt Adams had a saving grace of skepti-
cism that would have held him back from Robespierre’s course, but it is intriguing
to speculate on whether John Adams, an impatient, irritable, easily frustrated but
very determined man, with no very high opinion of his contemporaries, was not
the one among the American founders who, under pressures such as those in
France, could have most easily turned into a “Jacobin.”
Robespierre, in the speech in which he defined democracy, coupled Virtue and
Terror. It was clear enough what the Terror meant. It was very much a fact of po-
litical life in February 1794. It had risen gradually, from the street murders of July
1789, through the gruesome lynchings of September 1792, through the frenzies of
suspicion that came with Dumouriez’ defection and led to the creation of the Rev-
olutionary Tribunal, on through the executions of the Brissotins and the queen. As
in much else, so here, what began as popular clamor and violence ended up as a
weapon in the hands of the government. The Terror had become an instrument of
state. There had been genuine public revulsion against the Brissotins and the king
and queen. There was no such popular demand for the deaths of the Hébertists,
nor of the Dantonists a few weeks later, nor of the victims of the climactic “great”
Terror of June and July 1794. These were devised by the government itself, which
manufactured the necessary demand. Acts of government, also, were the death
sentences meted out by revolutionary courts in punishment for rebellion in the
32 Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” in Work s, 10 vols. (Boston, 1851), IV, 199; Robespierre,
“Rapport sur les principes de morale politique qui doivent guider la Convention,” February 5, 1794, in
C. Vellay, Discours et rapports de Robespierre (Paris, 1908), 325–26.