Many who, in ordinary times, would otherwise remain quiet, become in this way nomadic and extravagant in politics.

Among the foremost of these are found those who, through a classical education, can take in an abstract proposition and deduce its consequences, but who, for lack of special preparation for it, and confined to the narrow circle of local affairs, are incapable of forming accurate conceptions of a vast, complex social organization, and of the conditions which enable it to subsist.
Their talent lies in making a speech, in dashing off an editorial, in composing a pamphlet, and in drawing up reports in more or less pompous and dogmatic style; the genre admitted, a few of them who are gifted become eloquent, but that is all.

Among those are the lawyers, notaries, bailiffs and former petty provincial judges and attorneys who furnish the leading actors and two-thirds of the members of the Legislative Assembly and of the Convention: There are surgeons and doctors in small towns, like Bo, Levasseur, and Baudot, second and third-rate literary characters, like Barrere, Louvet, Garat, Manuel, and Ronsin, college professors like Louchet and Romme, schoolmasters like Leonard Bourdon, journalists like Brissot, Desmoulins and Freron, actors like Collot d'Herbois, artists like Sergent, Oratoriens[1203] like Fouche, capuchins like Chabot, more or less secularized priests like Lebon, Chasles, Lakanal, and Gregoire, students scarcely out of school like St.
Just, Monet of Strasbourg, Rousseline of St.Albin, and Julien of the Drome--in short, the poorly sown and badly cultivated minds, and on which the theory had only to fall to smother the good grain and thrive like a nettle.

Add to these charlatans and others who live by their wits, the visionary and morbid of all sorts, from Fanchet and Klootz to Chalier or Marat, the whole of that needy, chattering, irresponsible crowd, ever swarming about large cities ventilating its shallow conceits and abortive pretensions.

Farther in the background appear those whose scanty education qualifies them to half understand an abstract principle and imperfectly deduce its consequences, but whose roughly-polished instinct atones for the feebleness of a coarse argumentation.