Barras, who needs war in order to fish in troubled waters,[51113] and
especially by Reubell, a true Jacobin in temperament and intellect,
"ignorant and vain, with the most vulgar prejudices of an uneducated
and illiterate man," one of those coarse, violent, narrow
sectarians anchored on a fixed idea and whose "principles consist
in revolutionizing everything with cannon-balls without examining
wherefore."[51114] There is no need of knowing the wherefore; the animal
instinct of self-preservation suffices to impel the Jacobins onward,
and, for a long time, their clear-sighted men, among them Sieyes, their
thinker and oracle, have told them that "if they make peace they are
lost."[51115]--To exercise their violence within they require peril
without; lacking the pretext of public safety they cannot prolong their
usurpation, their dictatorship, their despotism, their inquisition,
their proscriptions, their exactions. Suppose that peace is effected,
will it be possible for the government, hated and despised as it is,
to maintain and elect its minions against public clamor at the coming
elections? Will so many retired generals consent to live on half-pay,
indolent and obedient? Will Hoche, so ardent and so absolute, will
Bonaparte, who already meditates his coup-d'etat,[51116] be willing to
stand sentry for four petty lawyers or litterateurs without any titles
and for Barras, a street-general, who never saw a regular battle?
Moreover on this skeleton of France, desiccated by five years of
spoliation, how can the armed swarm be fed even provisionally, the
swarm, which, for two years past, subsists only through devouring
neighboring nations? Afterwards, how disband four hundred thousand
hungry officers and soldiers? And how, with an empty Treasury, supply
the millions which, by a solemn decree, under the title of a national
recompense, have once more just been promised to them.[51117] Nothing
but a prolonged war, or designedly begun again, a war indefinitely and
systematically extended, a war supported by conquest and pillage
can give armies food, keep generals busy, the nation resigned, the
maintenance of power of the ruling faction, and secure to the Directors
their places, their profits, their dinners and their mistresses.
And this is why they, at first, break with England through repeated
exactions, and then with Austria and the Emperor, through premeditated
attacks, and again with Switzerland, Piedmont, Tuscany, Naples, Malta