Best 125 quotes in «french revolution quotes» category

I falter in the doorway, swept with memories of my reckless behavior last time I saw him. I sipped wine from a bottle. I kissed him. And as my pulse flutters with excitement, I know I would do it again, given the chance.

If I were to put a date on it, I would say that the French Revolution finally came to rest after almost exactly 180 years, on April 28, 1969, when President de Gaulle resigned in a huff and the Fifth Republic, which he had founded, sailed on without him without a tremor.

...if the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror. Virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompts, severe, inflexible. It is there an emanation of virtue. It is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs...is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud?... Are the enemies within not the allies of the enemies without?...

I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased— it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe’s heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton.

In basso serpeggiava lo spavento che può colorarsi di nobiltà e la paura, che si ammanta di viltà. La grigia massa degli anonimi, vibrava di passione, di eroismi, di sacrifici, di rabbia. I bassifondi dell'assemblea erano chiamati «la Pianura». Vi affioravano gli uomini preda del dubbio, dell'esitazione, gli uomini che indietreggiano, che rimandano, che spiano, timorosi l'uno dell'altro. La Montagna costituiva la folla anonima. Questa si riassumeva e si personificava in Sieyès.

Il n'est pas nécessaire de vivre. Il est nécessaire de naviguer.

In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated. Antisemitism reached its climax when Jews had similarly lost their public functions and their influence, and were left with nothing but their wealth.

In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don’t need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days’ time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page.

In the Convention tomorrow I shall put him up to confront Saint-Just. Imagine it. Our man the picture of starched rectitude, and looking as if he has just devoured a beefsteak; and Camille making a joke or two at our man’s expense and then talking about ’89. A cheap trick, but the galleries will cheer. This will make Saint-Just lose his temper-not easy, since he cultivates this Greek statue manner of his—but I guarantee that Camille can do it. As soon as our man begins to bawl and roar, Camille will fold up and look helpless. That will get Robespierre on his feet, and we will all generate one of these huge emotional scenes. I always win those.

I shall get nothing from these fools,' he muttered; 'and I am very much afraid of being here between a drunkard and a coward. Here's an envious fellow making himself boozy on wine when he ought to be nursing his wrath, and here is a fool who sees the woman he loves stolen from under his nose and takes on like a big baby. Yet this Catalan has eyes that glisten like those of the vengeful Spaniards, Sicilians, and Calabrians, and the other has fists big enough to crush an ox at one blow. Unquestionably, Edmond's star is in the ascendant, and he will marry the splendid girl--he will captain, too, and laugh at us all, unless'--a sinister smile passed over Danglars' lips--'unless I take a hand in the affair,' he added.

I resent you—” Robespierre said. His words were lost. “The People,” he shouted, “are everywhere good, and if they obstruct the Revolution—even, for example, at Toulon—we must blame their leaders.” “What are you going on about this for?” Danton asked him. Fabre launched himself from the wall. “He is trying to enunciate a doctrine,” he shrieked. “He thinks the time has come for a bloody sermon." “If only,” Robespierre yelled, “there were more vertu.” “More what?” “Vertu. Love of one’s country. Self-sacrifice. Civic spirit.” “One appreciates your sense of humor, of course.” Danton jerked his thumb in the direction of the noise. “The only vertu those bastards understand is the kind I demonstrate every night to my wife.

In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: “I’ll slaughter you!” “First,” says the deputy, “have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.

I tell you, dear Citizen Camille—it’s not the deaths I can’t stand. It’s the judgements, the judgements in the courtroom.

I turn away from the smell of death, pressing my lavender scented handkerchief as tight as I can against my nose.

I want to go with you," I told him. "To Egypt?" he whispered. "Wherever you go.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.

I think back to those days after the Bastille fell, the Mercure Nationale run from the back of the shop, that little Louise sticking her well-bred nose in the air and flouncing off to bawl out their printer—and you know, he was a good lad, François. I’d say, ‘Go and do this, this, this, go and tie some bricks to your boots and jump in the Seine,’ and he‘d”— Danton touched an imaginary forelock—‘right away, Georges-Jacques, and do you need any shopping while I’m out?’ Jesus, what a way to end up. When you see him, tell him I’d be obliged if he forgets he knows me.

Look, Fernand, your eyes are better than mine. I believe I see double. You know wine is a deceiver; but I should say it was two lovers walking side by side, and hand in hand. Heaven forgive me, they do not know that we can see them, and they are actually embracing!

Loving, of enemies is another dogma of feigned morality, and has besides no meaning. It is incumbent on man, as a moralist, that he does not revenge an injury; and it is equally as good in a political sense, for there is no end to retaliation; each retaliates on the other, and calls it justice: but to love in proportion to the injury, if it could be done, would be to offer a premium for a crime. Besides, the word enemies is too vague and general to be used in a moral maxim, which ought always to be clear and defined, like a proverb. If a man be the enemy of another from mistake and prejudice, as in the case of religious opinions, and sometimes in politics, that man is different to an enemy at heart with a criminal intention; and it is incumbent upon us, and it contributes also to our own tranquillity, that we put the best construction upon a thing that it will bear. But even this erroneous motive in him makes no motive for love on the other part; and to say that we can love voluntarily, and without a motive, is morally and physically impossible. Morality is injured by prescribing to it duties that, in the first place, are impossible to be performed, and if they could be would be productive of evil; or, as before said, be premiums for crime. The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity. Those who preach this doctrine of loving their enemies, are in general the greatest persecutors, and they act consistently by so doing; for the doctrine is hypocritical, and it is natural that hypocrisy should act the reverse of what it preaches. For my own part, I disown the doctrine, and consider it as a feigned or fabulous morality; yet the man does not exist that can say I have persecuted him, or any man, or any set of men, either in the American Revolution, or in the French Revolution; or that I have, in any case, returned evil for evil.

Madame Tallien shared honors with Josephine Beauharnais in being mistress to Barras, an ex-nobleman and ex-terrorist whose appetite for beautiful women, beautiful young men, and money was the only wholesome trait in his character.

May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into “permanent session” — what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term!

...more men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.

It’s all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you’re an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don’t you take a holiday?

Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after that. There is no sense of evil in the room, just tiredness and the aftertaste of petty squabbling. Camille drinks quite a lot of Fabre’s brandy. Towards daybreak, a kind of dismal camaraderie sets in.

Life’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now. Everything you disapprove of you’ll call “aristocratic.” This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church. If “Liberty” was the watchword of the first Revolution, “Equality” is that of the second. “Fraternity” is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.

On the whole, however, it was accepted that money not only talked, but governed. All the industrialist had to get to be accepted among the governors of society was enough money.

My father doesn’t have views. He would like to, but he can’t take the risk.

Ninety-three" was the war of Europe against France, and of France against Paris. And what was the Revolution? It was the victory of France over Europe, and of Paris over France. Hence the immensity of that terrible moment?, '93, greater than all the rest of the century

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit— bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.

People said— though this felt like a heresy— that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.

Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted...

Power swells the head and shatters the crown.

Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.' Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. 'It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.

Repeat the names,” my mother instructs, and we listen while Paschal recites the names of the months. “Vintage, Fog, Frost, Snow, Rain …” He hesitates on the sixth month. “Wind,” she says helpfully. We are all sitting at the caissier’s desk, and it is very important he get this right. “Wind,” he repeats after her. “Seed, Blossoms, M-Mead—” “Meadows,” I say. “Meadows, Harvesting, Heat, and Fruit.” Isabel claps. “Very good.” “And what year is this?” my mother asks. Paschal frowns. “Seventeen ninety-three?” “No,” Isabel says forcefully. “It is Year Two.” “But I don’t understand.” “The first year began on September twenty-second, seventeen ninety-two.” The day France declared itself the First Republic. “But how?” He doesn’t see how he could have been alive before time began. “That is the decree of the Convention,” she explains.

Robert Lindet, ossessionato creatore di quella piovra che aveva la sua testa nel comitato di sicurezza generale e che stendeva le braccia, ventunmila!, su tutta la Francia attraverso i comitati rivoluzionari; Lebuef, sul quale Girey-Duprè scrisse nel suo Noël des fau patriotes questo verso: «Lebouf vit Legendre et beugla»;Thomas Paine, americano, incline alla clemenza; Anacharsis Cloots, tedesco, barone, milionario, ateo, hébertiano, animo candido; l'integerrimo Lebas, amico dei Duplay; Rovère, una delle rare creature che godono della perfidia come uno può godere dell'arte per l'arte, il che avviene più frequentemente di quanto non si creda; Charlier, il quale voleva che si trattassero gli aristocratici con il voi; Tallien, elegiaco e feroce, dai cui amori nascerà il 9 termidoro; Cambacéres, un procuratore che diverrà principe; Carrier, un procuratore che si paleserà tigre; Laplanche, il quale esclamò un giorno: «Voglio che sia data priorità al cannone d'allarme»; Thuriot, che propose la votazione ad alta voce da parte dei giurarti del tribunale rivoluzionario; Bourdon de l'Oise, che sfidò a duello Chambon, denunciò Paine e fu denunciato da Hébert; Fayau, il quale propose l'invio nella Vandea di «un'armata incendiaria»; Tavaux, che il 13 aprile tentò la mediazione tra Gironda e Montagna; Vernier il quale chiese che i capi girondini e quelli della Montagna andassero a servire la patria come semplici soldati; Rewbell, che si chiuse dentro Magonza assediata; Bourbotte, che ebbe il suo cavallo ucciso alla presa di Saumur; Guimberteau, che fu a capo dell'armata delle Côtes di Cherbourg; Jard-Panvilliers, il quale comandò le truppe della Côtes de la Rochelle; Lecarpentier, che comandò la squadra di Concale; Roberjot, vittima dell'imboscata di Radstadt; Prieur de la Marne, che si compiaceva di indossare sul campo di battaglia le sue vecchie spalline di comandante si squadrone; Levasseur de la Sarthe, il quale, con una sola parola, indusse al sacrificio Serrent, comandante del battaglione di Saint-Armand; Reverchon, Maure, Bernard de Saintes, Charles Richard, Lequinio, e, in testa a questo gruppo un Mirabeau che portava il nome di Danton. Estraneo a questi due gruppi e dominatore di entrambi, Robespierre.

On March 8 Danton mounted the tribune of the Convention. The patriots never forgot the shock of his sudden appearance, nor his face, harrowed by sleepless nights and the exhaustion of traveling, pallid with strain and suffering. Complex griefs caught sometimes at his voice, as he spoke of treason and humiliation; once he stopped and looked at his audience, self-conscious for a moment, and touched the scar on his cheek. With the armies, he has seen malice, incompetence, negligence. Reinforcements must be massive and immediate. The rich of France must pay for the liberation of Europe. A new tax must be voted today and collected tomorrow. To deal with conspirators against the Republic there must be a new court, a Revolutionary Tribunal: from that, no right of appeal.

Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read without passion, almost without inflection, his eyes on the papers that he held in his left hand. Occasionally he would raise his right arm, then let it fall limply by his side: this was his only gesture, a staid, mechanical one. Once, towards the end, he raised his young face to his audience and spoke directly to them: “After this,” he promised, “there will be only patriots left.

Si indicava lo scanno dove sedevano gomito a gomito i sette rappresentanti dell'Haute Garonne, che invitati a pronunciarsi sul verdetto di condanna di Luigi XVI, avevano così proposto uno dopo l'altro: Mailhe, la morte. Delmas, la morte. Projean, la morte, Calès, la morte, Ayral, la morte, Julien, la morte. Desancy, la morte. Eco fatale che riempie in sé tutta la storia, dal giorno in cui fu instaurata la giustizia umana, eco sepolcrale tra le mura di tribunali. Si indicavano a dito gli uomini che avevano espresso il loro tragico giudizio, in tanta confusione; Paganel, che aveva detto: «Un re non può essere utile che con la sua morte. Dunque, a morte»; Millaud, il quale aveva gridato: «Se la morte non esistesse, oggi bisognerebbe inventarla»; il vecchio Raffron du Truillet, che aveva detto: «La morte, al più presto»; Goupilleau, il quale aveva urlato:«Subito al patibolo. Ogni lentezza aggrava la morte»; Sièyès, che aveva espresso con funerea concisione il suo voto: «La morte»; Thuriot, che si era opposto alla proposta di Buzot, tendente a proporre un appello al popolo: « È mai possibile?Le assemblee primarie? È mai credibile? Quarantamila tribunali, processo senza fine. La testa di Luigi XVI avrebbe tempo di incanutire, prima di cadere»; Augustin-Bon Robespierre, che, dopo il voto del fratello, aveva gridato: « Io non riconoscerei umanità che sgozzasse i popoli e perdonasse ai despoti. A morte! Chiedere un rinvio vuol dire appellarsi ai tiranni e non al popolo »; Foussedoire, sostituto di Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, il quale aveva sentenziato: «Sento tutto l'orrore di un'effusione di sangue, ma il sangue di un re non è sangue di creatura umana. A morte!» Jean-Bon Saint-André che aveva detto: «La libertà dei popoli si identifica con la morte dei tiranni»; Lavicomterie, assertore di questa formula: «Finchè un tiranno respira, la libertà soffoca. A morte!»; Chateauneuf-Randon, il quale aveva gridato: «Morte a Luigi l'ultimo!» Guyardin che vaeva espresso questo parere: «Deve essere giustiziato alla Barrière – Renversée!» volendo indicare la barriera del Trono; Tellier, il quale aveva detto: «Si deve fondere un cannone che abbia il calibro della testa di Luigi XVI, per combattere i nostri nemici».

So far as Louis XVI. was concerned, I said `no.' I did not think that I had the right to kill a man; but I felt it my duty to exterminate evil. I voted the end of the tyrant, that is to say, the end of prostitution for woman, the end of slavery for man, the end of night for the child. In voting for the Republic, I voted for that. I voted for fraternity, concord, the dawn. I have aided in the overthrow of prejudices and errors. The crumbling away of prejudices and errors causes light. We have caused the fall of the old world, and the old world, that vase of miseries, has become, through its upsetting upon the human race, an urn of joy." "Mixed joy," said the Bishop. "You may say troubled joy, and to-day, after that fatal return of the past, which is called 1814, joy which has disappeared! Alas! The work was incomplete, I admit: we demolished the ancient regime in deeds; we were not able to suppress it entirely in ideas. To destroy abuses is not sufficient; customs must be modified. The mill is there no longer; the wind is still there." "You have demolished. It may be of use to demolish, but I distrust a demolition complicated with wrath." "Right has its wrath, Bishop; and the wrath of right is an element of progress. In any case, and in spite of whatever may be said, the French Revolution is the most important step of the human race since the advent of Christ. Incomplete, it may be, but sublime. It set free all the unknown social quantities; it softened spirits, it calmed, appeased, enlightened; it caused the waves of civilization to flow over the earth. It was a good thing. The French Revolution is the consecration of humanity.

Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal—“Use your heads, give us a bloody chance, can’t you? We can’t keep up.” So the prisoners are waved away airily by their judges—“Go, you’re free.” Outside the door a steady man waits to fell them. Freedom is the last thing they know.

Suppose he found that persistent unsparing voice at his elbow one day, claiming that Danton lacked probity; he had an answer, pat, not a logical one, but one sufficiently chilling to put logic in abeyance. To question Danton’s patriotism was to cast in doubt the whole Revolution. A tree is known by its fruits, and Danton made August 10. First he made the republic of the Cordeliers, then he made the Republic of France. If Danton is not a patriot, then we have been criminally negligent in the nation’s affairs. If Danton is not a patriot, we are not patriots either. If Danton is not a patriot, then the whole thing—from May ’89—must be done again.

The Allies had made war on Napoleon as a tyrant and an oppressor of nations; yet once they had got him out of the way, they did him the favor of representing him as the torchbearer of the French Revolution. They did him the further favor of repeating his mistakes and besting him at them.

The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.

The Revolution is your bride,” he said. “As the Church is the Bride of Christ.

The revolutionary Terror, which is attacked for its revolutionary tribunal, its law of suspects and its guillotine, was a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty in which the object was to conquer tyranny or die for liberty. This Terror was willed by those who, having won sovereign power by dint of insurrection, refused to let this be destroyed by counter-revolutionary enemies

The Revolution has got frozen up. They have frozen it up with their talk of moderation. To stand still in Revolution is to slip backwards.

The revolutionaries failed to institute the novel forms of social and political organization they hankered after; Workers would not accept a ten-day week, or state-appointed priests, or rectangular departements, or the cult of the Supreme Being.

…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.

The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, “I have fed a patriot!”.

This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville.” Camille cast an eye over his relative’s best handwriting. “Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm squirm squirm … ‘the election of the Patriot Ministers … I know them all by reputation, but I am not so happy as to be known by them—