16 Fred Morrow Fling 



others without due credit. Rousse declares that the influence 

 of the treatise upon voluntary servitude by Etienne de la 

 Boc'tie is everywhere apparent in the "Essai sur le despotisme," 

 yet Mirabeau nowhere makes mention of the writings of La 

 Boetie.^ He draws largely from the works of Montesquieu 

 and Rousseau while differing with them upon important points. 

 Montesquieu would parley with absolutism ; Mirabeau would 

 not. Rousseau talked of a return to the primitive state of 

 society ; Mirabeau was very well satisfied with society as he 

 found it. There was little original in what Mirabeau wrote, 

 but the manner, the force, the conviction were all his own. 

 Filled with the reform spirit of the eighteenth century, he 

 played the role of an advocate of personal liberty and played 

 it with marked success. He took his weapons in whatever 

 armory he chanced to find them and employed them in the 

 most telling manner. The orator is ever present in his works 

 and he writes as he would have spoken to a listening multitude. 

 I have shown in the preceding pages, that Mirabeau was 

 eminently well fitted, both by birth and by experience, to 

 become an opponent of absolutism. From his father he 

 inherited an independent spirit. But the independence of the 

 Marquis de Mirabeau was more a survival of the past than a 

 precusor of the future ; it was feudal rather than democratic 

 in its nature. The spirit of the son was truly democratic, the 

 ripened product of long years of suffering. He had learned 

 to identify his cause with the cause of the French people.^ It 

 would be diflicult to name another historical character in whose 

 lifetime the forces outside himself were so unmistakably shap- 

 ing him into a great leader of men.^ As the prison doors of 



^ Rousse, p. 76. 



* "Car si Ton peut opprimer un citoyen, on povirra succesivement les 

 opprimer tous." Des lettres de cachet, p. 346. 



^ "Der Despotismus, den er am eigenen Leibe ei'fahren, hat ihn zu dem 

 gemacht, was er sein ganzes Leben geblieben ist." Gradnauer, p. I. 



60 



