free the learned men of France from the reproach that they had especially caused the outbreak of the French Revolution. The writers of the present day would fain be in favour again with the great; they have sought to win once more a soft place at the feet of power, and have behaved, in so doing, with such an air of servile innocence that they are now considered not as serpents, but common worms. But I cannot refrain from declaring the truth, that the writers of the last century were the men who did most to cause the outbreak of the Revolution, and who determined its character. I praise them for this as one praises a physician who brings about a rapid crisis, and allays by his skill the illness which might have been deadly. Without the word spoken by those scholars, France would have lingered on more miserably, and the Revolution, which must have inevitably come, would have assumed a far less noble form; it would have been vulgar and barbarous, instead of tragic and bloody. Or, what is worse, it might have deteriorated into something laughable and stupid, if its positive needs (materielle Nöthen) had not assumed an ideal expression, as has unfortunately not been the case in those countries where the writers have not led the people to demand a declaration of human rights, and where people make a revolution to escape paying a toll or to get rid of a mistress. Voltaire and Rousseau are
