Barère’s defence of the Revolutionary Government against the charge of dictatorship&nbs
Barère’s defence of the Revolutionary Government against the charge of dictatorship (11 Germinal, Year II)One has spoken of dictatorship, this word has resounded in my ear for fifteen minutes [during the interventions of Delmas and Legendre], it is essential to destroy such an idea. I see that the friends of the convicts are the only ones who have trembled for liberty. I only know dictatorship when one man takes all masks: sometimes the one of audacity, sometimes the one of suppleness ; when one surrounds oneself with friends, when one forms a party, when one walks [with] a troop of clients in one’s wake.What! there would be a dictatorship in the committees which are removable every month, every minute. On the day where they will not have defended liberty, where they will not have protected your borders, where they will have neglected to fight the factions that are enemies of liberty, the denunciation will be brought to this tribune, and I, a member of this committee, will myself be the first one to support them.Can one speak of dictatorship there, where there are committees which are responsible every minute, which only draw their authority from the National Convention, and which report to it what they do?I have said that you would not set an example of an aristocratic senate, whose members would have more rights than the other citizens. […]Source: Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, t. 32, p. 74f. -- source link
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