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Prophet_101-150.indd 103 3/2/12 10:29 PM III From I789 to the Trial ofLouis XVI 1 PROPHETIC PARALLELS AND THE COUNTER-REVOLUTIONARY LESSONS OF HUME Abbe Maury figures most appropriately at the beginning of this chapter dealing in part with examples of Hume's influence on some of the early counter-revolutionary leaders. Maury, generally recognized as the leading orator of the Right in the Assemblee Constituante, had been since 1785 a member of the French Academy and was eventually to be named a cardinal of the Church. He seems to have been a witty, rather forceful person and an extemporary speaker of some brilliance. It is not too inappropriate to contrast him, as contemporaries often did, with Mirabeau, his opposite number on the Left. Like his personal friends Gerdil and Bergier, Maury was fond of quoting Bossuet in defence of the ancien regime but, like them too, he occasionally found it useful to invoke also the authority of that new Bossuet, the historian David Hume. Long before the Revolution he had commended Hume as a loyal and impartial historian worth using to attack the "English bias" of the philosophe Voltaire. In 1777, for example, he quite happily pointed out that 103 ...

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