John Mill, who claimed never to have held religious beliefs, was nonetheless deeply moved by Bentham's Analysis--call-ing it "one of the books which by the searching character of its analysis produced the greatest effect upon me." Like his encounter with the principle of utility and his romance with the
Girondists, Mill's engagement with Bentham's atheism proved a deep and abiding experience that would inform his labors for the remainder of his life.
(Their ideological fury and aspirations to world-shaping power match the
Girondists and Napoleon, but they make quite a show of their disdain for the French.) Progressives, meanwhile, would fault these fathers of the republic for their aversion to global-scale government.
Marie Roland (executed in 1793 at the end of the play) is the respected leader of a group of
Girondists (the political groupings and principal protagonists are all explained in Kord's very detailed and helpful notes).
See also Alphonse de Lamartine, who calls Corday the "Angel of Assassination" in History of the
Girondists; or, Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution (Histoire des Girondins), trans.
Hawthorne, that is, anticipates the dynamics of the leftward imperative of modem politics, the drive toward ever more radical solutions to social ills and the consequent contempt felt by the more extreme for the less extreme: the Jacobins for the
Girondists, the socialist for the liberal, the Marxist for the socialist, the Stalinist for the Trotskyite, the anarchist for them all.
(30.) Compare Carlyle, The French Revolution, 536-37; and Alphonse de Lamartine, History of the
Girondists; or, Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution, vol.
