forfeiture; no one must enjoy the advantages of a pact of which some
of the conditions are repudiated. - Even better, as this pact is based
on natural right and is obligatory, he who rejects it or withdraws
from it, becomes by that act a miscreant, a public wrong-doer and an
enemy of the people. There were once crimes of royal lèse-majesty; now
there are crimes of popular lèse-majesty. Such crimes are committed
when by deed, word, or thought, any portion whatever of the more than
royal authority belonging to the people is denied or contested. The
dogma through which popular sovereignty is proclaimed thus actually
ends in a dictatorship of the few, and a proscription of the many.
Outside of the sect you are outside of the laws. We, the five or six
thousand Jacobins of Paris, are the legitimate monarch, the infallible
Pontiff, and woe betide the refractory and the lukewarm, all
government agents, all private persons, the clergy, the nobles, the
rich, merchants, traders, the indifferent among all classes, who,
steadily opposing or yielding uncertain adhesion, dare to throw doubt
on our unquestionable right.

One by one these consequences are to come into light, and it is
evident that, let the logical machinery by which they unfold
themselves be what it may, no ordinary person, unless of consummate
vanity, will fully adopt them. He must have an exalted opinion of
himself to consider himself sovereign otherwise than by his vote, to
conduct public business with no more misgivings than his private
business, to directly and forcibly interfere with this, to set himself
up, he and his clique, as guides, censors and rulers of his
government, to persuade himself that, with his mediocre education and
average intellect, with his few scraps of Latin and such information
as is obtained in reading-rooms, coffee-houses, and newspapers, with
no other experience than that of a club, or a municipal council, he