Note 251 — Chapter I

H. Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine: La Révolution, vol. ii., ‘La Conquête jacobine,’ Paris, 1881, pp. 11-12: ‘Neither exaggerated self-esteem nor dogmatic argument is rare in the human species. In every country these two roots of the Jacobin spirit subsist indestructible beneath the surface. Everywhere they are kept in check by established society, and everywhere they try to upheave the old historical structure which presses on them with all its weight.... At twenty years old, when a young man enters the world, his reason is hurt at the same time as his pride. In the first place, of whatever society he may be a member, it is a scandal to pure reason, for it has not been constructed on a simple principle by a philosophical legislator; it has been arranged by successive generations according to their multiple and varying needs.... In the second place, however perfect institutions, laws, and manners may be, since they have preceded him he has not assented to them at all; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, and have enclosed him, in advance, in a moral, political, and social mould which pleased them. It matters little if it displeases him; he is forced to submit to it, and, like a harnessed horse, he must walk between the shafts in the harness put on him.... It is not surprising, then, if he is tempted to kick against the framework in which, nolens volens, he is enclosed, and in which subordination will be his lot. Thence it comes that the majority of young men—above all, those who have their careers to make—are more or less Jacobins on leaving college; it is an infirmity of growth.’