Crane Brinton (1898–1968)

as the accidental triumph of villainy; republican historians conclude that the revolutionists were practical, far seeing men, and fail to explain either their ideology or their failure in 1794, except that the latter is always attributable to the villainy of their enemies. A true explanation must accept the facts, even though the facts are shocking to preconceived notions.

There is certainly little trace of political acumen in the extreme Right of the Assembly, and in the court party which it represented. Its ablest orator was the Abbé Maury, son of a cobbler, conservative with the interests of a self-made man, a good fighter, but utterly tactless and without any program. The Vicomte de Mira- beau, from his corpulence called Barrel Mirabeau, was an able obstructionist, especially when interrupting his brilliant brother. Outside the Assembly the queen, the king's brothers, most of the Versailles nobility formed a group with a definite aim: no con- cessions. It was a group scornful of propaganda, for the that it denied public opinion, in the modern sense, any place in very reason government. It was, of course, destined to failure from the simple fact that public opinion was already in 1789 a factor in government. Many of its members lived up to the middle-class notion of an aristocrat; that is, they were proud, haughty, dissolute, contemptuous of those immediately beneath them in the social scale. But as a class they were hardly the vicious and irresponsible tyrants revolutionary propaganda made them out. They were certainly among the most intellectual of aristocracies...