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14 of the court, the crimes of the ministers, the treasons of Narbonne, and the tortuous proceedings of the Girondists; and preserved the sacred fire (of patriotism), which the rich and powerful had endeavoured to smother by calumny and persecution.

But it was especially after the 10th of August, 1795, that the men I have just described, conceived the most flattering hopes, and redoubled their noble efforts to secure the triumph of their sublime cause. To the merit of Rousseau's conceptions, they added the boldness of applying them to a society of five and twenty millions of men. At this same epoch, too, the struggle between the friends of equality and the partisans of the Order of Egoism became more characterized and more animated. The project of governing the state under a show of republican forms, while at the same time retaining all the institutions of the monarchy, was publicly supported. To this project, united themselves all those descriptions of persons who, in times of political trouble, fear to lose their consideration and enjoyments. And as the same fear had attached them to royalism, they furnished grounds of accusation against the leaders of their party, for conspiring to re-establish the throne. So great was at that time the number and credit of the sincere friends of equality, whom the poignards of the aristocracy had not as yet cut off—such was the activity excited in the multitude by the hope of a speedy deliverance from their sufferings, and such was the force of the sham-patriots, who had hypocritically become the apostles of an equality they abhorred, with a view to replace the old aristocracy—so great was the power of all these combined (for they were then united), that the avowed partisans of the Order of Egoism were attacked, vanquished, and reduced to silence. Behold what produced the divisions of the National Convention, before the 31st of May, 1793, and the civil war which followed upon that memorable day's proceedings.