They are ignorant about cabinets, courts, populations, treaties, precedents, timely forms and requisite style.

Their guide and counselor in foreign relations is Brissot whose pre-eminence is based on their ignorance and who, exalted into a statesman, becomes for a few months the most conspicuous figure in Europe.[2347] To whatever extent a European calamity may be attributed to any one man, this one is to be attributed to him.

It is this wretch, born in a pastry-cook's shop, brought up in an attorney's office, formerly a police agent at 150 francs per month, once in league with scandal-mongers and black-mailers,[2348] a penny-a-liner, busybody, and meddler, who, with the half-information of a nomad, scraps of newspaper ideas and reading-room lore,[2349] added to his scribblings as a writer and his club declamation, directs the destinies of France and starts a war in Europe which is to destroy six millions of lives.

In the attic where his wife is washing his shirts, he enjoys rebuking rulers and, on the 20th of October, in the tribune,[2350] he begins by insulting thirty foreign sovereigns.

Such keen, intense enjoyment is the stuff on which the new fanaticism daily feeds itself.