Conclusion

Summary

The love of democracy is the love of equality. The love of democracy is also the love of frugality. Since it promises to each the same happiness and the same benefits, each should find in it the same pleasures and harbour the same aspirations, something which can only be expected from general frugality.

Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, 1748

The civic feast helps draw the threads of our story together. When the fraternal rejoicings are over, however, and the fond illusions dispelled, we return inevitably to the harsh realities of the Terror, which it has not been my purpose to evade. Rather it has been to show that the egalitarian agenda of the Jacobin phase of revolution was not fatally locked within an inevitable spiral of violence or bound to generate a police-state mentality, but that some imaginative political initiatives, often taken quite independently from the centre, were bent on achieving social harmony by peaceful and lawful means and in some instances actually succeeded in doing so. If such is the case, the shared meal, the dancing and the laughter, and the image of the common happiness they convey, need not induce scepticism, but carry political credibility. Fraternity, the pale secular ersatz of the Christian ‘love thy neighbour’, considered desirable on public holidays, but apparently inessential and ineffectual the rest of the time, may after all be capable of exerting an enduring influence on the pattern of human behaviour and thus be of relevance to the social contract.