was terrified, for the speech was the impassioned appeal of a boy to fight the Roman tyranny. This theme of the youthful Maximilien was later to become the great rhetoric of the Revolution, the rhetoric concerning which Saint-Just said subsequently: "The world has been empty since the Romans, and is filled only with their memory, which is now our only prophecy of freedom."
This was the rhetoric later displayed by Robespierre in the Convention. This is characteristic not only of the later Jacobin, but of the entire revolutionary opposition, of the moderate Feuillante, Mme. Roland, of the Rolandistes, of Mirabeau, Vergniaud and the Girondistes, Carnot and all the others. This element of rhetoric was not merely the external, not merely a figure of speech, but went so far as to befog the eyes of the later revolutionaries to the actual facts. They met with disaster because they confused the ancient, realistic, democratic community, which rested on the basis of true slavery, with the modern intellectual, democratic, representative state, based on the emancipated slavery of the bourgeois system.[1]
Maximilien had been a lawyer before the Revolution. He undertook cases for the poor; he defended, in his native city, people of low station, rentiers who had been cheated, old women who had been robbed. Robespierre's entire later policy
