The first use of the word "reactionary" in English and its link to Lazare Carnot
Thanks to @cadmusfly, today I discovered something rather interesting: the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first use of the word "reactionary" to an English translation of Carnot's famous Réponse à Bailleul, written as a defense against the latter's accusations of monarchism towards the ex-Director after the Fructidor coup. Said translation was published in 1799, a year later than the original and the passage in question is the following:
When in the Directory, I contributed to extricate it from new dangers, wherein these fame villains, then acting as factious reactionaries, had plunged it; and the recompence was my Fructidorian proscription.
— Reply of L.N.M. Carnot, citizen of France, one of the founders of the Republic and constitutional member of the Eexecutive Directory, to the report made on the Conspiracy of the 18th Fructidor. 5th year, by J. Ch. Bailleul, in the name of the Select Committee, London, 1799, p.149 (italics in the original).
This translation includes an hilarious foreword, in which Carnot gets wittily criticised. Below there are some excerpts I found to be the most entertaining. I must admit that the Brits are unbeatable when it comes to roast somebody!
It is not easy to discover the motive which could have led to the publication of the following work ; a work which, when we consider the situation of the Author, whether with a view to the ambitious prospects which he may be supposed still to entertain, or to that regard for character which is never wholly abandoned by the most profligate of mankind, must appear equally prejudicial to his interests and to his reputation.
Under the form of a Reply to the Calumnies (for such they appear to be) alledged against him by the Directorial Reporter, Bailleul, the Author has contrived to give a general view of his political Character and Opinions, and an Apology (or, more properly speaking, a Justification, for such the Author seems to consider it) of his Principles and Conduct during the Revolution. And this Apology, including an arrogant assumption of merit, from the murder of his sovereign, and confining his whole exculpation of the innumerable murders committed in his own name and under his own authority to a flight assertion of a disapprobation expressed in the presence of Robespierre and his other colleagues - This apology, devoting its Author to infamy (in the opinion of all thoae, by whom his conduct may be estimated according to the ancient and immutable principles of morality), is at the same time ſo contrived, that, of the three parties existing in France, the Royalists, the Jacobins, and the Directory, it is calculated to irritate and exasperate every one; - the Directors, as they are perſonally, and virulently, and (what is still more unpardonable) justly denounced to the world as the enemies of peace and the oppressors of mankind ;- the Royalists, of course ;-and the Jacobins, as their former conspiracies are cited, and a merit assumed from having assisted in their suppression.
he [Carnot] takes upon him to reproach the world in general, for their ignorance as to what used to pass in the Committees of Public Safety " It is not sufficiently known (says he) that I used to reproach Robespierre for his unnecessary cruelties. - "It certainly is not known ; nor will it be credited, upon such assertion ; nor, even if it were true, would it be a sufficient apology, or any thing like it. The Author would certainly have done better, not to have deviated into these extraneous exculpations ; unless, indeed, he could have proved that, by some inexplicable chain of obligation, it had been originally his duty to become a member of the Committee of Public Safety ; and that, once appointed to that sacred trust, he was bound to continue his services, and to retain life at the expence of guilt and infamy.
The next point in discussion is not calculated to inſpire much interest; it consists of the simple fact of the Author's having been betrayed and outwitted by his accomplices.
To Citizen Carnot therefore, in return for the striking and amusing spectacle, which he has displayed on the theater of the Republic, from the time of his original debut in the character of the Committee man, to the period of his final disappearance through the trap-door, like Schillers Fiesco, in the laſt act of the Conspiracy, entangled in the ſkirts of his Directorial Toga, and dragged over-board and drowned by his Republican brethren-in gratitude for the whole of this interesting and surprizing exhibition, we shall offer the humble tribute of our artless and unfeigned astonishment, unmixed with any of those emotions of sympathy, which belong to the province of a different species of the political drama ; that drama which, in the downfal of empires and the overthrow of ancient and established governments, displays those characters which Heaven itself surveys with approbation :
A great man struggling with the storms of fate,
And greatly falling with a falling state.
