A plain bourgeois, a common laborer is not transformed with impunity into an apostle or liberator of the human species .-- For, it is not his country that he would save, but the entire race.

Roland, just before the 10th of August, exclaims "with tears in his eyes, should liberty die in France, she is lost the rest of the world forever! The hopes of philosophers will perish! The whole earth will succumb to the cruelest tyranny!"[1254]--Gregoire, on the meeting of the Convention, obtained a decree abolishing royalty, and seemed overcome with the thought of the immense benefit he had conferred on the human race.
"I must confess," said he, "that for days I could neither eat nor sleep for excess of joy!" One day a Jacobin in the tribune declared: "We shall be a nation of gods!"-- Fancies like these bring on lunacy, or, at all events, they create disease.

"Some men are in a fever all day long," said a companion of St.Just; "I had it for twelve years..."[1255] Later on, "when advanced in life and trying to analyze their experiences, they cannot comprehend it."[1256] Another tells that, in his case, on a "crisis occurring, there was only a hair's breadth between reason and madness."-- "When St.Just and myself," says Baudot, "discharged the batteries at Wissenbourg, we were most liberally thanked for it.

Well, there was no merit in that; we knew perfectly well that the shot could not do us any harm."-- Man, in this exalted state, is unconscious of obstacles, and, according to circumstances, rise above or falls below himself, freely spilling his own blood as well as the blood of others, heroic as a soldier and atrocious as a civilian; he is not to be resisted in either direction for his strength increases a hundredfold through his fury, and, on his tearing wildly through the streets, people get out of his way as on the approach of a mad bull.
If they do not jump aside of their own accord, he will run at them, for he is unscrupulous as well as furious .-- In every political struggle certain kinds of actions are prohibited; at all events, if the majority is sensible and wishes to act fairly, it repudiates them for itself.
It will not violate any particular law, for, if one law is broken, this tends to the breaking of others.

It is opposed to overthrowing an established government because every interregnum is a return to barbarism.