The plan of campaign was, at any rate, the one followed out by the conspirators, as Chamfort, the friend and confidant of Mirabeau, admitted in his conversation with Marmontel:
The nation is a great herd that only thinks of browsing, and with good sheepdogs the shepherds can lead it as they please.... Money and the hope of plunder are all-powerful with the people.... Mirabeau cheerfully asserts that with 100 louis one can make quite a good riot.<sup></sup>
Another contemporary thus describes the methods of the leaders:
Mirabeau, in the exuberance of an orgy, cried one day: "That *canaille* well deserves to have us for legislators!" These professions of faith, as we see, are not at all democratic; the sect uses the populace as revolution fodder [*chair à révolution*], as prime material for brigandage, after which it seizes the gold and abandons generations to torture. It is veritably the code of hell.<sup></sup>
It is this "code of hell" set forth in the "Projet de Révolution" that we shall find repeated in succeeding documents throughout the last hundred years--in the correspondence of the "Alta Vendita," in the Dialogues aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu by Maurice Joly, in the Revolutionary Catechism of Bakunin, in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and in the writings of the Russian Bolsheviks to-day.
Whatever doubts may be cast on the authenticity of any of these documents, the indisputable fact thus remains that as early as