0745685749 enemies democracy

32 The Inner Enemies of Democracy
seems within reach. In the first place, we must provide
ourselves with good laws. Revolutionary France consumed
constitutions at a breakneck pace. Condorcet
himself put one such constitution forward; in the public
debate on it, Saint-Just, a prominent political figure,
proposed his own project, in which he laid out a major
role for the Assembly which he was addressing. His
words are worth recalling: ‘The Legislator commands
the future; there is no point in his being weak; it is for
him to will the good and to perpetuate it; it is for him
to make men what he wants them to be.’ 2 The malleable
human material is placed in the hands of the legislator,
that is to say of the members of the Assembly, or
rather those who control them. Once the good has
been attained, it will of course need to be ‘perpetuated’:
in other words, the use of violence cannot stop, the
Revolution will be followed by the Terror. This does
not result by happenstance, but from the very structure
of the project. As the highest good is at stake, all paths
taken to reach it are good (‘there is no point in his being
weak’) and we are entitled to destroy those who oppose
it, as they have ipso facto become an incarnation of evil:
obstacles can only come from a bad will. The next step
will be the transformation of this means into an end:
Terror and the state institutions it requires will absorb
all the forces of power, and the guillotine will never rest
(Rabaut Saint-Étienne will be one of its victims, Saint-
Just another).
We see that, while claiming to draw on the ideal of
equality and freedom, what I call here (to remind us of
its religious origins) political messianism – a messianism
without a messiah – had its own final goal (establishing
the equivalent of heaven on earth), as well as specific
ways to achieve it (Revolution and Terror). In its quest
for a temporal salvation, this doctrine holds no place for
God, but preserves other features of the ancient religion,
such as blind faith in the new dogmas, fervent belief