For the experimental society to stand up and speak, it certainly didn’t have to wait for Lenin, even less for Hitler—both epigones who merely found themselves with enough resources to implement the reformative visions of so many of their predecessors. The cold and inventive face of experimental society—its technological face—is scornfully silent, anonymous, and concerns itself above all with establishing new practices in factories, offices, banks, and in the rural areas. Its other face, which is garrulous and scheming, finds its original tone in the voices of the provincial Jacobins. This is what a Monsieur Leclerc, representative of the Lyon committee of Jacobins in Paris, had to say on May 12, 1793: “We have to establish Machiavellianism among the people; we have to wipe out all that is impure from the whole surface of France.”³¹⁴ Monsieur Baudot addressed the Jacobins of Strasbourg on 19 Frimaire, Year II: “Those who are selfish, shortsighted enemies of liberty, the enemies of all nature, must not be counted among our children.³¹⁵ Aren’t they perhaps in the same situation as all those who oppose the public good or who simply play no part in creating it? Let us destroy them entirely … Even if they were a million, shouldn’t we perhaps sacrifice the twenty-fourth part of ourselves to destroy a canker that could infect the rest of the body?” But these voices still tremble with indignation. They don’t have the purity of those concerned only with the future good, like Monsieur d’Antonelle, who felt that “to construct the republic it was necessary to establish approximate equality of ownership and, for this end, to kill off one-third of the population.”³¹⁶ This sober extermination of “one-third of the population,” so that, at long last, money and property ownership would no longer be so unequal, but sensibly distributed, was intended to root out all possibility of overweening luxury, of cocottes, of gambling, of vast empty spaces, as well as condemning all dissipation of esprit, whose essence was contrary to republican virtue. This obscure proposal, in its clear phrasing, in its eagerness for mediocrity, expresses an idea to which just one detail would later be added, for variety and spice: the specification of the Jews, or kulaks, or class enemies in general, as the prime candidates to form part of that “third of the population.” Burckhardt saw the proposals of the provincial Jacobins as “the most intimate core of the Revolution,” and noted: “Here the new France can clearly be discerned.³¹⁷ Its proponents do not aim toward socialism or communism, through which they would obtain only an average universal misery and equality of benefits (whereas they sought equality of rights, with the secret qualification that the others would later be crushed). Instead, they want new private property, distributed in more or less uniform fashion, but in abundant measure. And in order for those chosen few to be well off, a great mass of people must die. The goal is modern French well-being.” From his observatory in Basle, illuminated by hatred, Burckhardt had recognized the numbing well-being of capital and the punishing misery of socialism as being stars in the same constellation.