“So far as I am concerned—between ourselves—I couldn’t say who I feel more sorry for: the sovereign or the people, France or Europe. If the prince takes for granted the love of the people then he is lost, and if the people, for their part, don’t guard themselves against the character of the prince, I see it ending in terrible disaster, I see years of bloodshed to cancel out the enthusiasm of a few months. I see the innocent and the guilty embroiled in the same devastation. Whatever happens, either the cause of freedom is under threat, or the peace of France is at risk.

“Far be it for me to suspect Louis XVI of thirsting for blood, but a weak monarch surrounded by bad advisors easily becomes cruel, or, to put it another way, his weakness allows certain cruelties to be practiced under the authority of his name. In whatever way I look at the consequences of yesterday’s events, I fear for the future … … …

“Burn this letter.”¹⁷²

The unreliability of the historian. Louis Madelin, an eminent Napoleonic historian, considers Talleyrand’s remark to Lafayette during the Fête de la Fédération to be unreliable, because it is “improbable.” Pasquier, who recorded it in his Mémoires, claimed he heard it from Lafayette himself. But Madelin insists: “The man [Talleyrand] was not a sacrilegious loudmouth and, as for Lafayette, a very serious character, he was never able to make anyone laugh.”¹⁷³

Between the Fall of Names, indirectly provoked by Cloots’s embassy, and the Fête de la Fédération, Michelet is gripped by pathos; several times he is caught up in the eloquence of great moments, he bows before the “prophetic symbol.”¹⁷⁴ But the emphasis also serves to delicately protect the gleaming nucleus of the Revolution: “In this system there is no passing on of previous merit, there is no nobility.¹⁷⁵ But neither is there any transmission of earlier guilt.” The task of the Revolution is to wipe out original sin. The abolition of the merits of birth is no more than the exoteric face of a much more radical abolition: that of the guilt of mankind, Adamic guilt, the cancellation of original sin. Evil is now reduced to a conscious action willed by an individual: it is not a legacy that weighs on the fabric of life, that oversteps all limits of will and consciousness, that leaves its mark on everything. Here, all of a sudden, Michelet is a theologian—and from the shadows he summons his rival theologian, Joseph de Maistre, a man who, when he refers to the Revolution, will always refer to the indelibility of original sin.

What is striking above all in the Fête de la Fédération is the nakedness of the symbolism. No one recognizes symbols when they emerge from sleep, from carelessness, and from mockery—and then they seek to be transformed into Fact. The specter that guides the Revolution is that of the coniunctio, of the hieros gamos, the sacred marriage. But the first gesture of union immediately ebbs toward unity: “Alas!¹⁷⁶ Experience of the world teaches us something strangely sad, though true, that union is often reduced to unity.” Thus it happens that “yesterday, the Revolution was a matter of religion; and now it becomes police.”¹⁷⁷ Yesterday, in Michelet’s dream, it is the Fête de la Fédération; now it is the massacre that would be carried out, exactly a year later, in the same Holy Place.