At the mere sight of Danton, with his porter's vocabulary, his voice like an alarm bell of insurrection, his cyclopean features and air of an exterminator, humanity takes alarm; one does not surrender oneself to a political butcher without repugnance.
The Revolution demands another interpreter, like itself captivatingly fitted out, and Robespierre fits the bill,[3181] with his irreproachable attire, well-powdered hair, carefully brushed coat,[3182] strict habits, dogmatic tone, and formal, studied manner of speaking.

No mind, in its mediocrity and incompetence, so well harmonizes with the spirit of the epoch.

The reverse of the statesman, he soars in empty space, amongst abstractions, always mounted on a principle and incapable of dismounting so as to see things practically.
"That bastard there," exclaims Danton, "is not even able to boil an egg!" "The vague generalities of his preaching," writes another contemporary,[3183] "rarely culminated in any specific measure or legal provision.

He combated everything and proposed nothing; the secret of his policy happily accorded with his intellectual impotence and with the nullity of his legislative conceptions." Once he has rattled his revolutionary pedantry off, he no longer knows what to say .-- As to financial matters and military art, he knows nothing and risks nothing, except to underrate or calumniate Carnot and Cambon who did know and who took risks.[3184]--In relation to a foreign policy his speech on the state of Europe is the amplification of a schoolboy; on exposing the plans of the English minister he reaches the pinnacle of chimerical nonsense;[3185] eliminate the rhetorical passages, and it is not the head of a government who speaks, but the porter of the Jacobin club.
On contemporary France, as it actually exists, he has not one sound or specific idea: instead of men, he sees only twenty-six millions simple robots, who, when duly led and organized, will work together in peace and harmony.

Basically they are good,[3186] and will, after a little necessary purification, become good again.