The result is visible in the deeds of Treilhard, of Berlier, of Merlin de Douai, of Cambaceres, in those of the Constituant and Legislative Assemblies, in the Convention, under the Directory, in their Jacobin zeal or hypocrisy, in their talent for combining despotic tradition with tyrannical innovation, in their professional skill in fabricating on all occasions a snare of plausible arguments with which to properly strangle the individual, their adversary, to the profit of the State, their eternal master.
In effect, not only had they almost strangled their adversary, but likewise, through an aftereffect, their master: France which, after fourteen months of suffocation, was approaching physical suicide.[2319] Such success, too great, had obliged them to stop; they had abandoned one-half of their destructive creed, retaining only the other half, the effect of which, less imminent, was less apparent.

If they no longer dared paralyze individual acts in the man, they persisted in paralyzing in the individual all collective acts .-- There must be no special associations in general society; no corporations within the State, especially no spontaneous bodies endowed with the initiative, proprietary and permanent: such is Article II.

of the Revolutionary Creed, and the direct consequence of the previous one which posits axiomatically the sovereignty of the people and the omnipotence of the State.

Rousseau,[2320] inventor of the first, had like-wise enunciated the second; the constituent assembly had solemnly decreed it and applied it on a grand scale,[2321] and successive assemblies had applied it on a still grander scale;[2322] it was a faith with the Jacobins, and, besides, in conformity with the spirit of Roman imperial right and with the leading maxim of French monarchical right.

On this point the three known jurisprudential systems were in accord, while their convergence brought together around the same table the jurists of the three doctrines in a common task, ex-parliamentarians and ex-members of the Committee of Public Safety, former pro-scribers and the proscribed, the purveyors of Sinamari with Treilhard and Merlin de Douai, returned from Guiana, alongside of Simeon, Portalis, and Barbe-Marbois.