472
PARTISAN REVIEW
we understand that his ideal society does not derive from the
Social
Contract
nor from the Enlightenment-it is not even rooted in his
own century.
He wanted boys to leave the paternal home at the .age of five,
and belong to the Republic until they were twenty-five (the age of
Saint-Just when he wrote). They were to spend the twenty years in
uniform, sometimes as tillers of the soil and sometimes as soldiers
j
girls were to be brought up by their mothers. Let us not take the
text in question lightly. It does not present us with one of those
utopian constructions, so common at the time, in which lawyers weary
of their codes gave way to Greuze-like fantasies; and
it
is preposterous
only if one assumes that Saint-Just's goal was happiness. Once we
realize that he was aiming at
something else,
this text of
his
will take
us to the very center of
his
conception-by the way, the word "con–
ception" does not really apply here. Saint-Just only half believed
in laws and in the Senate, so long as the laws were not based on
the prevailing
mores,
and so long as the Senate was not founded on
virtue. The
mores
were to assure the maintenance of virtue, and
what he meant by virtue was
his
own: the vocation of the Republic.
He wanted to create institutions which would mold men, and men
who would will laws worthy of them. When we cease to view such
institutions as means toward human happiness, let alone as embodi–
ments of reason-seeing them as something akin to the metric system
or the reforms of the Civil Code-their true nature is disclosed: they
are the rule of an immense monastery in which the revolutionary
cockade has replaced the cross. For Saint-Just the task of the nation
was to liberate all the oppressed just as the early monastic orders
were founded to liberate souls. The Spartan way of life he advocates
is that of the religious orders. His uniform is of sackcloth. Saint–
Just has been regarded as a rationalist because he was a realist;
Saint Bernard, Saint Dominic, Saint Ignatius--even Mohammed–
were not dreamers.
"All
definitions must be based on conscience: the intellect is a
sophist who leads all the virtues to the scaffold." He says that institu–
tions are the means of forming this conscience, and whatever he
may say of it, this conscience is more than a sense of justice. He
thought he had found such institutions in Sparta; he could have
found them in the Church.
If
he feels himself identified with the
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