Contre les factions nouvelles et les deputes corrumpus

July 26, 1794 - Convention (extracts only)

(provided by Ayumi Mizota - translator unknown)

When I see the mass of vices the torrent of the revolution has rolled pell-mell with the civic vices, I have sometimes trembled for fear of becoming tainted in the eyes of posterity by the impure vicinage of those perverse men who mingled in the ranks of the sincere defenders of humanity; but the overthrow of the rival factions has, as it were, emancipated all the vices; they believed that the only question for them was to make division of the country as a booty rather than make her free and prosperous. I am thankful that the fury that animates them against everything that opposes itself to their projects has traced the line of demarcation between them and all right minded people; but if the Verres and the Catilines of France believe themselves already far enough advanced in the career of crime to expose on the rostrum the head of their accuser. I also have but now promised to my fellow citizens a testament formidable to the oppressors of the people, and I bequeath to them from this moment opprobrium and death! [...]
Frenchman, do not allow your enemies to degrade your souls and to unnerve you virtues by a baleful heresy! [...] Citizens, efface from the tombstones this impious maxim, which throws a funeral cape upon all nature and flings insults upon death. Rather engrave that 'Death is the beginning of immortality!' My people, remember that if in the republic justice does not with absolute sway, and if this word does not signify love of equality and of country, then liberty is but a vain phrase! O people, you who are feared […] whom one flatters! You who are despised, you who are acknowledged sovereign, and are ever being treated as a slave […] remember that wherever justice does not reign, it is the passions of the magistrates that reign instead, and that the people have changed their chains and not their destinies!
Remember that there exists in your bosom a league of knaves struggling against public virtue, and that it has a greater influence than yourselves upon your own affairs--a league that dreads you and flatters you in the mass, but proscribes you in detail in the person of all good citizens! […]
Know, then, that any man who will rise to defend public right and public morals will be overwhelmed with outrage and proscribed by the knaves! Know, also, that every friend of liberty will ever be placed between duty and calumny; that those who cannot be accused of treason will be accused of ambition; that the influence of uprightness and principles will be compared to tyranny and the violence of factions, that your confidence and your esteem will become certificates of proscription for all your friends; that the cries of oppressed patriotism will be called cries of sedition; and that, as they do not dare to attack you in mass, you will be proscribed in detail in the person of all good citizens until the ambitious have organized their tyranny. Such is the empire of the tyrants armed against us! Such is the influence of their league will corrupt men, ever inclined to serve them.
Thus the unprincipled wretches impose upon us law to force us to betray the people, under penalty of being called dictators! Shall we subscribe to this law? No! Let us defend the people at the risk of becoming their victims! Let them hasten to the scaffold by the path of crime and we by that of virtue. Shall we say that all is well? Shall we continue to praise by force of habit or practice that which is wrong? We would ruin the country. Shall we reveal hidden abuses? Shall we denounce traitors? We shall be told that we are unsettling the constituted authorities, that we are endeavouring to acquire
personal influence at their cost whatever are we to do? Our duty! What objection can be made to him who wishes to tell the truth and who consents to die for it? Let us then say that there exists conspiracy against public liberty; that it owes its strength to a criminal coalition that is intriguing even in the bosom of the Convention that this coalition has accomplices in the Committee of General Safety and in the office of this Committee, which they control; that the enemies of the republic has opposed this committee to the Committee of Public Safety have entered into this scheme of mischief; that the coalition thus formed tries to ruin all patriots and the fatherland.
What is the remedy for this evil? Punish the traitors, renew the offices of the Committee of General Safety; weed out the Committee of Public Safety also, constitute the unity of the government under the supreme authority of the National Convention, which is the centre and the judge, and thus crush all factions by the weight of national authority, in order to erect upon their ruins the power of justice and of liberty. Such are my principles. If it be impossible to support them without being taken for an ambitious one, I shall conclude that principles are proscribed and that tyranny reigns among us, but not that I should remain silent for what can be objected to in a man who is in the right and knows how to die for his country?I was created to battle against crime, not to govern it. The time has not come when upright men may serve their country with impunity! The defenders of liberty will be but outlaws so long as a horde of knaves shall rule!