The facts the historian relates, though, are no laughing matter. King Louis, he says, was secretive, timid, sometimes indecisive, but intelligent, educated and conscious of his duty, and not the prince without a will that people paint. As early as 1786 and 1787, with Calonne at the head of the finances, the same king tried to abolish the tax privileges and impose a land tax common to all. The two orders shielded by privilege, the clergy and the nobility, resisted: first in the Assembly of Notables, held in February and March of 1787, then in the Parlements; and that resistance, he says, hastened the final ruin of the old kingdom.

What now, Flaccus, you say? Wasn't it the greed of the rich that brought the kingdom down, not the clubs of philosophers? Granted, my friend, and gladly. The man who values his coin above his country sets fire to his house to keep out the cold. But hear the rest. Petitfils denies that the revolutionary people was one uniform thing; he says it was active minorities, clubs, societies of thought, circles, academies, patriotic associations, Masonic lodges, which manufactured opinions and then imposed them as the general will. Cochin, whom he praises, called this a kind of machine; the real society, made of varied men, was gradually pushed aside by an abstract society that spoke in the people's name; and from 1793 the Jacobins alone claimed to be the will of the people.

I did not learn this from books. I remember Clodius' gangs, which hawked the shouting of a few in the back streets as the voice of the Roman people; and the electoral clubs, abolished by law because they cast votes in the citizens' place. Our people votes in its tribes and centuries, each in his rank and place; the man who shouts in a tavern is not the people, even if he shouts well. And I remember myself, a young man drunk on philosophy at Athens, a tribune under Brutus, who thought liberty could be restored at a stroke and with fine words. At Philippi I learned how quickly elegant opinions turn to flight; I left my little shield behind, not well, and found wisdom.

For this is what the manufacturers of new men always forget: drive nature out with a pitchfork, and she will still come running back, as I once wrote to my Fuscus. Decree, if you like, that from this day man is new; tomorrow morning the same man will get up, loving his field, putting his sons before his country, counting the coins in his strongbox, envying his neighbour, worshipping his fathers' gods in a corner. A law that fights nature does not change the man; it makes the lawgiver ridiculous, and then, when laughter is not enough, cruel.

What forbids a man to tell the truth laughing? There is a measure in things, there are fixed limits, beyond and short of which right cannot stand. On one side the Notables, who would not pay a penny in common; on the other the clubs, who would mould man entire afresh. Both stray from the middle, and in opposite directions, yet they arrived at the same place. One thing, though, I miss in this interview, and I will not keep quiet about it: of the price of grain, of bread, of the annona, not a word. A Roman magistrate, before inquiring into ideological machines, would have asked what bread was selling for in the market; a hungry man is more easily led by a club than a fed one.

The remedy is old, and not new to me. My father, a freedman, taught me not by abstract precepts but by examples: look at that spendthrift, look at that miser, take care you don't become like them. That is how a citizen is made; that is not how he is manufactured. Those who wish to repair the commonwealth should first make the rich pay their share before they preach discipline to the poor; then restore, little by little, the temples and the households and the young, rather than demolish the man. The Gauls, whom we have heard shouting in the streets these very months about the cost of living, perhaps know this better than their philosophers.

They wanted to make a new man; they found the old one, and a little hungrier.