A Wholesome Terror of the People

Then one of the two, who had long guessed by my dress and face from what country I came, said to me: "And you, how is it in your country?" I told him we met from time to time, upon occasions not less often than seven years apart, and did just as they had done. That one-sixth of us voted one way and one-sixth the other; the first, let us say, for a moneylender, and the second for a man remarkable for motor-cars or famous for the wealth of his mother; and whichever sixth was imperceptibly larger than the other, that sixth carried its man, and he stood for the flats of the Wash or for the clear hills of Cumberland, or for Devon, which is all one great and lonely hill.

"This man," said I, "in some very mystic way is Ourselves—he is our past and our great national memory. By his vote he decides what shall be done; but he is controlled."

"By what is he controlled?" said my companions eagerly. Evidently they had a sneaking love of seeing representatives controlled.

"By a committee of the rich," said I promptly.

At this they shrugged their shoulders and said: "It is a bad system!"

"And by what are yours?" said I.

At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking as it were far away with his eyes, answered: "By the name of our country and a wholesome terror of the people."

"Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders in turn, but a little awkwardly, "is different from ours."
—Hilaire Belloc, "The Election"

I realize, the French Revolution—as it actually happened I mean, not the Saxon dog blood-libel version—shows, far from the evil of the mob, that the mob is a necessary corrective in politics.

Remember, the Terror was not the mob. The Terror was the Committee of Public Security—as I said before, a small legislature, a microcosm of every flaw in Republicanism. Its mastermind was Carnot (not Robespierre), who was something like the Minister of Defense. Robespierre supported it because Carnot had convinced him it was the will of the people, and, though personally opposed to capital punishment, he believed officials only had the right to act as instruments of the people's will, whatever their own views. Ironically, of course, the Terror's only popularity actually came from Robespierre's support of it; but, when he himself fell to it, following his ideals unto death itself¹, the Terror soon ended. Why?

Because Carnot discovered that, without Robespierre, he couldn't maintain popular support for the thing. I.e., it was ended by fear of the mob.

Similarly, Marie Antoinette's trial. She was charged with, among other things, incest with her son, which was of course complete nonsense. The charge was dropped, because of protests from the women in the audience—far from the Madame Defarge caricature (it would've been Citizen Defarge, but it's not like Dickens knew sod all about the period), the Revolutionary women took pity on the Queen herself. The magistrates were worried about unrest in the court.

Again, the slander was ended by fear of the mob.