Page:Coubertin - France since 1814, 1900.djvu/24

, but historians agree in recognising in it a deadly political poison, and there is none from which France has suffered more. It is not however a poison indigenous to the country ; we find no traces of it before the writers of the eighteenth century corrupted the mind of France with their many utopias ; but from that date it developed rapidly. There is reason however to believe that but for Napoleon it would have eliminated itself of its own accord. The Revolution and its horrors had pretty well used up the Jacobins ; the Empire saved them. It accepted their theories, and even condescended to apply them, with the help of the sword and the tambour. Thus was Jacobinism perpetuated, crystallised under the name of Bonapartism.

It was opposed in 1814 by the old party of reaction, also crystallised, not by the Napoleonic chemistry but by the atrophy of emigration. Only realise the state of mind of these guileless émigrés : many of them were men who in their exile had led a life of privation, and were absolutely sincere in their devotion to the Monarchy. They never doubted that from the day when this Monarchy was restored they too would be reinstated in all