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Notes
1. François Furet, “Terror,” A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. F. Furet and M. Ozouf, trans. A. Goldhammer (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 147.
2. It brings to mind Georges Sorel’s comment about the danger of impatient and disillusioned optimists:
The optimist can lead his country to the worst disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then blames these disappointments on his contemporaries, instead of explaining what actually happens as the result of historical necessities; he is tempted to get rid of people whose ill will seems to him to be a danger to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who spilt the most blood were precisely those who had the strongest desire to let their equals enjoy the golden age of which they dreamt and who had the greatest sympathy for human misery: optimistic, idealistic, and sensitive men, they showed themselves to be the most unyielding the greater their desire for happiness.
Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. Thomas Ernest Hulme, rev. Jeremy Jennings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10.
3. Germaine de Staël, Des circonstances actuelles qui peuvent terminer la Révolution et des pcincipes qui doivent fonder la République en France (1798), ed. Lucia Omacini (Geneva: Droz, 1979), 255.