Quotes About Jacobins

It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed; in ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors.

Moreover, the very needs of the war obliged any government to centralize and discipline, at the expense of the free, local, direct democracy of club and section, the casual voluntarist militia, the free argumentative elections on which the Sansculottes thrived. The process which, during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, strengthened Communists at the expense of Anarchists, strengthened Jacobins of Saint-Just's stamp at the expense of Sansculottes of Hébert's.

The Cult of Reason sprang up all over France in 1793 and was even worshipped in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. After the Bishop of Paris resigned, proclaiming his previous error of supporting Christianity, the Goddess of Reason, impersonated by an actress of wealthy means, took his place at the altar. She sat under a baldachino holding the new symbols of power, while all around her danced Jacobins in various states of religious, revolutionary and reasoned ecstasy.

Any revolution, once begun, carries the potential for fanaticism. Revolutionaries in power can erect, in the name of a glorious utopian ideal, a system of state terror, as demonstrated by the Leninists and Stalinists, the ideological heirs of the French Jacobins.

Jacobins defamed the classical, purely military war among states that had developed in the 18th century. They claimed that it was a "museum piece" of the ancien régime, and rejected, as the work of tyrants and despots, the liquidation of civil war and the bracketing of foreign war that the state had achieved. They replaced purely state war with national war and the democratic levée en masse [mass uprising].

I became obnoxious to the Jacobins because I reprobated their aristocracy, which aimed at usurping all legitimate authority.

Populists are, after all, often deemed to be heirs of the Jacobins.

Abandoned to themselves, they soon weary of disorder, and instinctively turn to servitude. It was the proudest and most untractable of the Jacobins who acclaimed Bonaparte with greatest energy when he suppressed all liberty and made his hand of iron severely felt. It

It will be necessary to repeat the year 1793," wrote Lenin. "After achieving power, we'll be considered monsters, but we couldn't care less."22 Lenin and his self-described group of "glorious Jacobins" would monstrously do just that, and, indeed, could not care less.

In a pharmacy toothpaste with a swastika. A mood of fear such as must have existed in France under the Jacobins. No one fears for their lives yet--but for bread and freedom.

Revolutions begin with the mutual discovery of the ideologues and the Jacobins: the first happy to have discovered compatible souls, the second to have found flunkies.