Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 5.djvu/591

A.D.1791.] Brissot, Danton; in the departments, those of Vergniand, Guadet, Isnard, Louvet, who were afterwards Girondists; and those of Thuriot, Merlin, Carnot, Couthon, Danton, Saint Just, who subsequently united with Robespierre, and were, by turns, his instruments and his victims. We have already mentioned the main features of the lives of several of these men. Amongst the Girondists, Condorcet was a philosopher, and he carried his peculiar philosophy into his politics.



He was a disciple of Voltaire, D'Alembert, and Helvetius. His philosophy, therefore, was of the earth. He believed in the dignity of reason, and in the omnipotence of the understanding, with liberty as its handmaid. Heaven—the abode of all ideal perfections, and in which man places his most beautiful dreams—was limited by Condorcet to earth; his science was his virtue; the human mind his deity. Intellect illumined by science was, in his eyes, omnipotent, and would necessarily triumph over all difficulties, and renew the face of nature and the spirit of society. He had made of this system a line of politics, whose first idea was to adore the future and abhor the past. He was, in fact, one of the shallow and, at that time, multitudinous school who mistook the thing for the maker of it; the workman's tool for the Workman, the finite mind for the infinite, and would have believed in the sun's rays and not in the sun, were it not forced so absolutely on their senses. Like all that class, whilst refusing to believe in what all the ages, and the wisest and best men of all the ages, have believed, he was ready to put full faith in things which are opposed to daily and hourly experience; namely, he believed that science could extend human life indefinitely, and that, in fact, men only died because they were ignorant; simply because they had not as yet learned how to live for ever, but they might do so if they followed science devotedly. Condorcet had not the gift of eloquence like Mirabeau, therefore he did not shine in the assembly; but he had his newspaper, the Cronique de Paris, in which he ridiculed royalty and Christianity, and, though naturally of a mild and amiable disposition, grew fierce and uncharitable in his politics.

Brissot at this time, however, was the leading figure of the Gironde party. Although he had failed to obtain an entrance into the first assembly, he had become a member of this, and, both in the tribune and in his newspaper, the Republican, attacked the monarchy with the most undisguised and most unrelenting virulence. Brissot was the son of a poor pastrycook of Ouarville, near Chartres, in which city he had been educated with Petion. He had early taken to literature, in which he assumed the name of Warville, from the place of his birth, Ouarville. He edited, before the revolution, the Courrier de l'Europe, a newspaper of Boulogne. He became author of various works, as