National Gazette

Address of the National Convention to the People of France, respecting falsified copies of the New Constitution.

THE National Convention is informed, that the enemies of liberty have already falsified the constitutional act, and are using every perfidious effort to circulate in profusion copies of it disgraced by lies. It is easy to discover their intention. They wish to prevent the people from knowing and appreciating the real labours of their mandatories. They wish to corrupt and divide, by anticipation, the public opinion—they wish to stifle that general assent of the nation, ready to burst forth, and meet the eternal basis of liberty and equality; they behold only with despair the approaching reign of the law: and they hasten to glut themselves, by moral anarchy, with the troubles and misfortunes of which the constitution is about to deprive them. How weak and foolish are these corrupters of public reason, who imagine that, by obscuring it for some days, it will never appear! as if the People could be mistaken in that respect; and as if the Press, which they wished to make their accomplice, will not confound them by conveying to the People the real thoughts of their Constituents! Such attempts of modern aristocracy were unknown to the ancients. If the power of printing was wanting to them, they were at least ignorant of its crimes. They committed their laws only to incorruptible brass, or to the pure remembrance of children: and they did not behold them blasted in their infancy by that invention which ought to consecrate and diffuse them. It is therefore a new obligation imposed on the legislator, to watch over, and as one may say, to follow his own work, until it arrive in full purity at the most distant cottage. It is also a new duty for a revolutionary people, who, by the noblest means, are approaching the term of their regeneration, to guard, with the utmost vigilance, against those base calumniators of the constitutional monument—those secret enemies of the nation, who wish to annihilate all its rights, and to blast even its hopes, by breaking the anchor which the legislators have thrown amidst the storm. Among the Athenians the law inflicted death on every stranger who introduced himself into the popular assembly, because he usurped the sovereignty. Among the French, become free, let him who shall introduce himself into the thoughts of the legislators, to misrepresent the result of them, fall under the sword of the law. The National Convention invites all the friends of liberty to search out with diligence these fabricators of false laws. It recommends to all citizens not to pass sentence, nor to express their will, but on authentic copies, addressed directly by the executive council to communes, and the constituted authorities. Frenchmen, your patriotism will easily defeat those manoeuvres. Every grand epoch of the revolution has always excited one crime more of aristocracy and royalism. We had reason to expect, that all their crimes and efforts would be united at the moment when the constitution was about to appear: but these efforts themselves will enure to you the success of a work, which they would have altered, had it been hurtful to the people; and unfavourable to their rights. These impotent efforts will conduce to establish the republican constitution, as calumny has always conducted to the triumph of virtue.