ON SAINT-JUST
471
revolution had created the world
in
which he lived, and which the
Republic alone had the right to judge. He aspired to be the sword–
bearer of
this
judgment against all, and by all possible means, from
the bayonet charge at Fleurus to police action. The Republic would
be
saved by the militant communion of the faithful, and it would
change the condition of men; its enemies were not infidels, but
scoundrels. A singular mythology? No more so than that of the Koran,
which many remarkable men of action have served; no more so than
certain varieties of Marxism. Saint-Just was twenty-one at the taking
of the Bastille, and died just after Fleurus. His brief life as a man
developed wholly within a victorious Apocalypse. But "it
is
for you
to decide whether the French people are to
be
tradesmen or con–
querors ..."
is
not exactly political: it is Islam.
He dreamed of idyllic plowmen under the benign rule of vener–
able old men.
As
in the stories. Some day his old men will be studied
along with the Augustan bucolics and the sheep of Bonaparte. Did
he think that the end of privilege, followed by the end of conspiracies,
would be enough to assure the general prosperity? Whenever his
voice takes on its characteristic tone, he
is
no longer speaking of the
organization of farm production, but of
delivering
the people: "It
is
less a matter of making the people happy than of preventing them
from being unhappy." That is, to deliver the people from their heredi–
tary oppressors, as well as from the conspirators who were hoarding
grain
and devaluing the currency, and especially from the foreign
invader; but also from the rich citizens of Strasbourg who let the
soldiers of the army of the Rhine go without shoes-and from the
prosecutor, Schneider, whom he had exposed and showed to the
people bound to the guillotine. The Robespierrists were not defenders
of the bourgeoisie. They were defenders of the Republic, that is to
say of the state. True, they crushed the Parisian proletariat; but the
tenth of Thermidor made money king. The Board of the Bank of
France financed Brumaire to the strains of the music of the Direc–
tory's balls; no Spartan nobility was to succeed the last French aristo–
crat. Nevertheless, nothing was further from Saint-Just's mind than
the proletariat: "A trade
ill
befits the true citizen: a man's hand is
meant only to till the soil and to bear arms."
Rousseau declared that man was meant to till the soil, but not
to bear arms. And Saint-Just becomes strikingly clear to us when
