al of crimes.

There is also a difference in the intensity of heat; insurrection is
often a volcano, revolt is often only a fire of straw.

Revolt, as we have said, is sometimes found among those in power.
Polignac is a rioter; Camille Desmoulins is one of the governing powers.

Insurrection is sometimes resurrection.

The solution of everything by universal suffrage being an absolutely
modern fact, and all history anterior to this fact being, for the space
of four thousand years, filled with violated right, and the suffering of
peoples, each epoch of history brings with it that protest of which it
is capable. Under the Caesars, there was no insurrection, but there was
Juvenal.

The facit indignatio replaces the Gracchi.

Under the Caesars, there is the exile to Syene; there is also the man of
the Annales. We do not speak of the immense exile of Patmos who, on his
part also, overwhelms the real world with a protest in the name of the
ideal world, who makes of his vision an enormous satire and casts on
Rome-Nineveh, on Rome-Babylon, on Rome-Sodom, the flaming reflection of
the Apocalypse. John on his rock is the sphinx on its pedestal; we may
understand him, he is a Jew, and it is Hebrew; but the man who writes
the Annales is of the Latin race, let us rather say he is a Roman.

As the Neros reign in a black way, they should be painted to match. The
work of the graving-tool alone would be too pale; there must be poured
into the channel a concentrated prose which bites.

Despots count for something in the question of philosophers. A word that
is chained is a terrible word. The writer doubles and trebles his style
when silence is imposed on a nation by its master. From this silence
there arises a certain mysterious plenitude which filters into thought
and there congeals into bronze. The compression of history produces
conciseness in the historian. The granite solidity of such and such a
celebrated prose is nothing but the accumulation effected by the tyrant.

Tyranny constrains the writer to conditions of diameter which are
augmentations of force. The Ciceronian period, which hardly sufficed
for Verres, would be blunted on Caligula. The less spread of sail in
the phrase, the more intensity in the blow. Tacitus thinks with all his
might.

The honesty of a great heart, condensed in justice and truth, overwhelms
as with lightning.

Be it remarked, in passing, that Tacitus is not historically superposed
upon Caesar