What produces the general good is always terrible or seems bizarre when begun too soon... The Revolution must stop when it has perfected public happiness and liberty through the laws.
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When a people, having become free, establish wise laws, their revolution is complete.
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Citizens, by what illusion could one persuade himself that you are inhuman. Your Revolutionary Tribunal has condemned three hundred rascals to death in a year. Has not the Spanish Inquisition done worse than that. Have the English assizes butchered no one in that period? What of the kings of Europe, does anyone prate to them of pity? Ah, do not allow yourselves to grow soft-hearted!
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It has always seemed to me that the social order was implicit in the very nature of things, and required nothing more from the human spirit than care in arranging the various elements; that a people could be governed without being made thralls or libertines or victims thereby; that man was born for peace and liberty, and became miserable and cruel only through the action of insidious and oppressive laws. And I believe therefore that if man be given laws which harmonize with the dictates of nature and of his heart he will cease to be unhappy and corrupt.
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Insurrection is the exclusive right of the people and of the citizen. Every foreigner, every man clothed with public authority, is outlawed if he proposes it and must be put to death as a usurper of sovereignty and as interested in fomenting troubles for the purpose of doing evil or of adorning himself. Insurrections taking place under a despotism are always salutary. Those which break out in a free state are sometimes dangerous for liberty itself, because the revolt usurps its sublime pretexts and its sacred name. Revolts in free states leave long and painful wounds which bleed a whole century.
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It is not enough, citizens, to have destroyed the factions, it is necessary now to repair the evil that they have done to the country.
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Posted by: Silvana Stremiz
One can't reign and be innocent.
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