Robespierre who persuaded the Chamber to pass a self-denying ordinance.
All its members were declared ineligible for a seat in the legislature
that was to replace them. The members of the Right on this occasion went
with their bitter foes of the Extreme Left, and to both parties have
been imputed sinister and Machiavellian motives. The Right, aware that
their own return to the new Assembly was impossible, were delighted to
reduce the men with whom they had been carrying on incensed battle for
two long years, to their own obscurity and impotence. Robespierre, on
the other hand, is accused of a jealous desire to exclude Barnave from
power. He is accused also of a deliberate intention to weaken the new
legislature, in order to secure the preponderance of the Parisian clubs.
There is no evidence that these malignant feelings were in Robespierre's
mind. The reasons he gave were exactly of the kind that we should have
expected to weigh with a man of his stamp. There is even a certain truth
in them, that is not inconsistent with the experience of a parliamentary
country like our own. To talk, he said, of the transmission of light and
experience from one assembly to another, was to distrust the public
spirit. The influence of opinion and the general good grows less, as the
influence of parliamentary orators grows greater. He had no taste, he
proceeded with one of his chilly sneers, for that new science which was
styled the tactics of great assemblies; it was too like intrigue.
Nothing but truth and reason ought to reign in a legislature. He did not
like the idea of clever men becoming dominant by skilful tactics, and
then perpetuating their empire from one assembly to another. He wound up
his discourse with some theatrical talk about disinterestedness. When he
sat down, he was greeted with enthusiastic acclamations, such as a few
months before used to greet the stormful Mirabeau, now wrapped in
eternal sleep amid the stillness of the new Pantheon. The folly of
Robespierre's inferences is obvious enough. If only truth and reason
ought to weigh in a legislature, then it is all the more important not
to exclude any body of men through whom truth and reason may possibly
enter. Robespierre had striven hard to remove all restrictions from
admission to the electoral franchise. He did not see that to limit the
choice of candidates was in itself the most grievous of all
restrictions.

The common view has been that the Constitution of 1