a robot, subjecting
their human machine to the cruelest restraints in order to mechanically
maintain it in the unnatural, rigid posture, which, according to
principles, they inflict upon it. Thenceforth, all ties are sundered
between them and the nation; to prey upon, bleed and starve this nation,
to re-conquer it after it bad escaped them, to repeatedly enchain
and gag it--all this they could well do; but to reconcile it to their
government, never!--Between them, and for the same reason, through
another consequence of the same theory, and another effect of the same
lusts, no bond between them would hold. Each faction inside of the
party, having forged its ideal people according to its own logical
process and necessities, exercised the orthodox privilege of claiming
the monopoly of sovereignty.[51145] To secure the benefits of
omnipotence, it has combated its rivals with falsified, annulled or
constrained elections, with plots and mendacity, with ambushes and
sudden assaults, with the pikes of the rabble and with the bayonets of
soldiers. It has then massacred, guillotined, shot, and deported the
vanquished as tyrants, traitors or rebels, and survivors do not forget
this. They have learnt what their so called eternal constitutions amount
to; they know how to estimate their proclamations and oaths, their
respect for law, justice, their humanity; they understand them and
know that they are all so many fraternal Cains,[51146] all more or less
debased, dangerous, soiled and depraved by their work; the distrust is
irremediable. They can still turn out manifests, decrees and cabals, and
get up revolutions, but they can no longer agree amongst themselves and
heartily defer to the justified ascendancy and recognized authority
of any one or among their own body.--After ten years of mutual assault
there is not one among the three thousand legislators who have sat in
the sovereign assemblies that can count on the deference and loyalty
of a hundred Frenchmen. The social body is disintegrated; amongst the
millions of disconnected atoms not a nucleus of spontaneous cohesion
and stable co-ordination remains. It is impossible for civil France to
reconstruct itself; as impossible as it would be to build a Notre Dame
of Paris, or a St. Peter's of Rome out of the slime of the streets or
the dust of the highways.

With military France it is otherwise. Here, men have made trial of each
other, and are devoted to each other, subordinates to