This, Shelley decided, had been the problem with political revolutions like France in 1789. They had been put together not by men of artistic genius, but by lawyers like Georges Danton and Robespierre, who for all their rhetoric about virtue and freedom were no different from their predecessors—or in Shelley’s mind, the British politicians of his own day. Their imaginations were just as limited, their thirst for material power just as insatiable, their reliance on brute force to resolve conflicts (Shelley was a vegetarian and pacifist) just as oppressive.
