"The French soldier," writes a Prussian officer after Jena,[3353] "are small and puny.

One of our Germans could whip any four of them.

But, under fire, they become supernatural beings.

They are swept along by an indescribable ardor of which there is not a trace among our soldiers....

What can you do with peasants whom nobles lead into battle, but whose danger they share without any interest in their passions or recompenses!"-- Coupled with the physical needs which requires a certain amount of ease and of daily food, and which, if too strenuously opposed, produces passing jacqueries, there is a still more potent longing which, on suddenly encountering its object, seizes on it, clings to it, gorges it, and produces revolutions that last: this longing is the desire to contemplate one-self with satisfaction and complacency, forming of one's self a pleasing, flattering image, and of trying to impress and plant this image in the minds of others; in short, the ambition for a great self-esteem and of becoming greatly esteemed by others.[3354] This sentiment, according to the quality of the person and according to circumstances, gives birth sometimes to the noblest virtues and the most sublime devotion, and at other times to the worst misdeeds and the most dangerous delirium: the man becomes transfigured, the sleeping god or demon which both live within him is suddenly aroused.
After 1789, both appear and both together; from this date onward, says an eye-witness,[3355] and, during one quarter of a century, "for most Frenchmen and in whatever class," the object of life is displaced; each has put it outside of himself; from now on, the essential thing for everybody is "to have lived," or "to have died for something," for an idea.