r life. He is to furnish her, moreover, with the means
for espousing a future husband, a genuine republican, by who she is
pregnant, and who would not allow her to entertain any idea of fanatical
capers.]

CHAPTER II. REACTIONARY CONCEPT OF THE STATE.

I. Reactionary concept of the State.

Reactionary concept of the State.--Analogy between this idea
of the State and that of antiquity.--Difference between
antique and modern society.--Changed circumstances.

The Jacobin theory can then be summarized in the following points:

* The speculative creation of a curtailed type of human being.

* An effort to adapt the living man to this type.

* The interference of public authority in every branch of public
endeavor.

* Constraints put upon labor, trade and property, upon the family and
education, upon worship, habits, customs and sentiments.

* The sacrifice of the individual to the community.

* The omnipotence of the State.

No theory could be more reactionary since it moves modern man back to
a type of society which he, eighteen centuries ago, had already passed
through and left behind.

During the historical era proceeding our own, and especially in the old
Greek or Latin cities, in Rome or Sparta, which the Jacobins take for
their models,[2201] human society was shaped after the pattern of an
army or convent. In a convent as in an army, one idea, absorbing and
unique, predominates:

* The aim of the monk is to please God at any sacrifice.

* The soldier makes every sacrifice to obtain a victory.

Accordingly, each renounces every other desire and entirely abandons
himself, the monk to his rules and the soldier to his drill. In like
manner, in the antique world, two preoccupations were of supreme
importance. In the first place, the city had its gods who were both its
founders and protectors: it was therefore obliged to worship these in
the most reverent and particular manner; otherwise, they abandoned it.
The neglect of any insignificant rite might offend them and ruin it.
In the second place, there was incessant warfare, and the spoils of war
were atrocious; on a city being taken every citizen might expect to be
killed or maimed, or sold at auction, and see his children and wife
sold to the highest bidder.[2202] In short, the antique city, with its
acropolis of temples and its fortified citadel surrounded by implacable
and threatening enemies, resembles for us the institution o