Commentary
In November 1792, he called for the execution of Louis XVI, declaring, “I see no middle ground: this man must reign or die! He oppressed a free nation; he declared himself its enemy; he abused the laws: he must die to assure the repose of the people.”
Saint-Just won a shining revolution as a représentant en mission (the equivalent of a Soviet commissar) to bolster the morale and effectiveness of troops at the front. Shooting some officers perked up military performance considerably, and Saint-Just returned to Paris in early 1794 where he was elected head of the National Convention. He turned the apparatus of The Terror on the Hébertists for being too radical and on Georges Danton and his followers for being too moderate.
Related Stories
“The vessel of the Revolution can arrive in port only on a sea reddened with torrents of blood.”
“A nation generates itself only upon heaps of corpses.”
“Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs.”
“You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive in the republic, and who does nothing for it.”
By the summer of 1794 many French politicians felt that, unless checked, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and the Committee of Public Safety might also endanger them. Thus they engineered a coup and saved their own necks by sending Saint-Just and 21 of their erstwhile leaders to the axe.
Few have expressed the mistaken anthropology of the Enlightenment as well as Saint-Just did in a speech to the National Convention in April, 1793:
“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.”
This notion, that humanity is born good and requires only a bit of social tinkering to be made happy and free, is at the heart of every “ism” of the last two centuries and leads from the Storming of the Bastille to the Soviet gulags, Auschwitz, the Cultural Revolution, and Critical Race Theory.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Please rewrite this sentence.
Source link
