Talk:.NzE.MjY1Mzc

presiding over the most beautiful revolution that politics & the human spirit have ever experienced. If I were speaking to a despot, he would blame me; within monarchy itself, each house, municipality, & province, was in one way or form, a separate empire with its own mores, customs, laws, traditions & language. The despot needed to isolate peoples, separate regions, divide interests, impede communication, & halt the simultaneity of ideas & the identity of movements. Despotism maintained the diversity of idioms; a monarchy must resemble the Tower of Babel. There is but one universal language for a tyrant: that of force, to maintain obedience; & that of taxes, to accrue money. On the contrary, within a democracy, the surveillance of government is conferred to each citizen. In order to surveil it one must be familiar with it, above all in terms of language. A Republic’s laws imply that all citizens must keep an eye on each other, as well as keep under constant surveillance the observance of laws & the conduct of public officials. Can we keep this promise to one another if we maintain this confusion of languages, the lack of primary education for the people, & the ignorance of citizens? For that matter, how much have we not spent translating the laws of the first two National Assemblies in the different idioms spoken in France, as if it were our duty to maintain these barbarous jargons & crude idioms, useful only to fanatics & counterrevolutionaries. To allow citizens to remain ignorant of the national language, is to commit treason against the country; it is to allow the torrent