A
wondrous discovery this was, periodically applied at each succeeding
crisis in the course of the French revolution. But the barrack and
the bivouac, thus periodically laid on the head of French society, to
compress her brain and reduce her to quiet; the sabre and the
musket, periodically made to perform the functions of judges and of
administrators, of guardians and of censors, of police officers and of
watchmen; the military moustache and the soldier's jacket, periodically
heralded as the highest wisdom and guiding stars of society;--were not
all of these, the barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the musket, the
moustache and the soldier's jacket bound, in the end, to hit upon the
idea that they might as well save, society once for all, by proclaiming
their own regime as supreme, and relieve bourgeois society wholly of the
care of ruling itself? The barrack and the bivouac, the sabre and the
musket, the moustache and the soldier's jacket were all the more bound
to hit upon this idea, seeing that they could then also expect better
cash payment for their increased deserts, while at the merely periodic
states of siege and the transitory savings of society at the behest of
this or that bourgeois faction, very little solid matter fell to them
except some dead and wounded, besides some friendly bourgeois grimaces.
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