ON SAINT-JUST
469
spell around them from which they drew their authority.
Let us not
be
taken in by their ventures into literature: interest
in these notes is great; instruction from them, zero. The writings of
Bonaparte, had he died .at thirty, would suggest a personality with
scarcely any resemblance to Napoleon. These men, capable of acting
in their own pure style, showed no originality in their literary reveries,
naively emulating Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Carnot did likewise in
his
poems; and Lados, too, in
L' Education des FiZles.
(But Ladas wrote
Les Liaisons Dangereuses,
as Saint-Just wrote his speeches. . . .)
While the "force of circumstances" plays a crucial role in historical
destinies, every man of history is guided, from his very first action,
by a sense of reality, of these very "circumstances"-the notebooks
in which we believe we shall find Saint-Just's secrets, actually contain
only trivialities. His confidences and his reveries are of little impor–
tance: his real secret is that which makes his actions possible. He
jotted down some inane remarks about the army; but when he had
to submit a plan for its reorganization, he wrote a speech which Na–
poleon admired. But if his energy and his realism are comparable to
Bonaparte's, still they served the Republic, not
his
own ambition. A
republic which was not "the government": an ideal which he helped
create, strove for, achieved, and strove for still; as Bonaparte strove
for glory. He is identified with this effort even more than Napoleon
with his victories, than Napoleon with the Empire.
It
remains to
discover what the Republic meant for Saint-Just.
His Italian campaign is, dearly, his speech demanding the death
of the King. Michelet has described its impact: "When, dropping
Louis XVI and passing to the subject of the Gironde, he turned his
whole body toward the Right and directed at the Girondists, along
with his words, his whole person, his hard and murderous glance,
there was no one there who did not feel the cold of steel." The force
of his speech did not come from the eloquence of the period, but
from formulas which were meant to be Roman-and were. Formulas
inseparable from their grip on the event. His words lose their profound
resonance
if
one sees in them only the accusation of Louis XVI. "That
man must reign or die!" was not addressed to the King: it was the
indictment of the Convention by its own conscience. The assembly,
of which the majority regretted condemning for the sake of justice,
