38 CARNOT. 
even to excuse, those bloody saturnalia, by referring them 
to the will of the people. But if I judge of the people 
of 1798, whom I have not known, by that which I saw 
in action in 1830, the explanation is false. I do not 
hesitate to say so. The people in a moment of effer- 
vescence and blindness, sometimes fall into culpable 
actions, but it has never associated itself with daily 
barbarities. It,is degrading the people to say, that fear 
only could drive it to meet inimical hordes: nor are its 
sentiments better known, when it is insinuated that it 
wished for the death of one of the members of this 
Academy who honoured France by his genius; and the 
death of another of our co-academicians, who did honour 
to human nature by his virtue. No, Gentlemen; no! 
in the noble country of France, the death of Lavoisier, 
the death of Malesherbes, could not be ordered by con- 
siderations for the public good. No excuses for such 
crimes; they must be branded to-day, they must be 
branded to-morrow; they must be branded for ever. 
Devoted by sentiment, by conviction, by the irresistible 
power of logic to the worship of liberty, let us repel far 
from us the execrable thought, that the scaffold is the 
inevitable auxiliary of democracy. 
The crimes that I have been openly denouncing have 
been in some measure personified by France, by Europe, 
by the whole world: these crimes are Robespierre ! 
Some young, some estimable writers, who are now de- 
spoiling our revolutionary annals with the indefatigable 
patience of the Benedictines of former ages, think they 
have discovered that public opinion is quite wrong. 
According to them, Robespierre and his partisans have 
much less contributed to the sanguinary acts of terror, 
than the Billaud-Varennes, the Collot d’Herbois, or the 
