ON SAINT-JUST
477
typical attitude by which the petty bourgeois transforms himself into
the aristocrat of fiction. The Rastignacs envy the power of Saint–
Just, but they regard
him
less as a model than as a kind of wild man,
as Danton had already called
him.
What could he teach a politician,
an ambitious historian of the Second Empire or the Third Republic,
a Rubempre, or even a Julien Sorel? Energy? Is there any relation
between skill in the social chess game that dazzled them, and the
conduct of a legendary action? between the complacency with which
they paint their portraits, and the fury with which he carves out his
statue? For this faceless statue is one of the symbols of the Republic,
along with the
Marseillaise,
the flags of the Year II (to which he
gave their colors), and the guillotine. . . . He seems to have been
very little interested in his own personality: this book, which brings
together everything that is known about him, gives us almost nothing
of his personal quality. Proud he certainly was; with a sacerdotal
pride quite different from vanity. He wanted to be only his deeds,
and these deeds to be exemplary. But while the theatrical deed
clothes the individual, the exemplary deed strips him bare. This
supreme somnambulist passes through the Terror like Lady Mac–
beth through the castle of Dunsinane, but the only ghost that haunts
him is the Republic, and the bloody hands he extends are the hands
of justice. There were no "royal whims" for Saint-Just.
"I wanted a Republic which everyone would have loved," said
Desmoulins sadly. What was it when it ceased to be the promise of
a Golden Age, when it became a reality? First of all, it became a
target for kings; Saint-Just was, with Camot, the Republic's most
efficient defender. We have seen that his earliest glamour came from
his will to be the sword of freedom.
"Freedom consists in being ruled by rational laws."
If
it con–
sisted only in that he would have been forgotten long ago. But on
the eve of Fleurus, the Revolution was still a vast imaginary domain.
Contrary to Michelet, to Victor Hugo-contrary above all to the
views of the Commune- many historians have tried to prove that
the course of the Revolution was determined by the conflict of class
interests. But we know that Victor Hugo did not invent Fleurus, and
that the night of the fourth of August, in which the nobility signed
