6 Charles Kuhlmann 



appear, then, that his motives in this case were extremely complex 

 and as usual well concealed. They are to be found not in the 

 criticism of the decree of the assembly, but in the first part of 

 Robespierre's speech dealing with the organization of the national 

 guards aimed, as we shall see in a moment, first at the destruction 

 of the power of Lafayette and in the second place at the intro- 

 duction of the Parisian populace into the guards. 



The two passages cited above from the papers of Brissot and 

 Desmoulins do not inform us of the nature of Robespierre's plan 

 for the organization of the guards.® But in the Bulletin de Brest 

 we find an account of a Jacobin session of which the exact date is 

 not given. 



The Jacobin club (so runs the account) is occupying itself with the 

 organization of the national guards. M. Robespierre read a much ap- 



Jacobins in their efforts to secure a law against emigration. For the latter 

 instance, see the discussion in the Jacobin club on Feb. 28, 1791, in Aulard, 

 Societe des Jacobins, II, pp. 95-113. 



'Lc/1459, in the national library at Paris bears the title " Discours sur 

 I'organisation des gardes nationales. Par Maximilien Robespierre, membre 

 de I'Assemblee Nationale. 1791." This is a pamphlet of seventy-eight 

 pages and contains the provision for a rotating command of the guards 

 mentioned below by the Bulletin, no officer being permitted to hold com- 

 mand longer than six months and never to command the guards of more 

 than one department. The armed man, he says, is always the master of 

 the unarmed and a state in which a large armed force perpetually exists 

 in the midst of an unarmed populace is never free and the stronger the 

 discipline in the army the more certain is the destruction of freedom. 

 The national guard must be the whole nation without distinction of class 

 and without property qualifications, for no one can be deprived of the 

 right of self-defense nor do the sacred rights of liberty depend upon the 

 ownership of a certain amount of property. Although the people them- 

 selves have made the revolution its fruits are to be reserved to an ambi- 

 tious class seeking personal advantage, but this class will be uncere- 

 moniously swept aside. 



What relation exists between this printed speech and the one delivered 

 at the Jacobins we do not know, but it will be noted from the parts we 

 have here repeated that the printed document preserves the core of the 

 speech read at the Jacobins as retained by contemporaries. It contained 

 many other important observations and was upon the whole closely reasoned 

 in favor of the ideas of those who were possessed by an excessive fear of 

 the military power as a means of overturning the work of the revolution. 



348 



