This lesson studies Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau's "Necker's Financial Plan by Honore Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau", delivered in its historical setting. After this short context paragraph, the reading gives the speech itself so students can examine occasion, audience, and direct address in the speaker's own words.

The minister of finance has presented a most alarming picture of the state of our affairs. He has assured us that delay must aggravate the peril; and that a day, an hour, an instant, may render it fatal. We have no plan that can be substituted for that which he proposes. On this plan, therefore, we must fall back. But, have we time, gentlemen ask, to examine it, to probe it thoroughly, and verify its calculations? No, no! a thousand times no! Haphazard conjectures, insignificant inquiries, gropings that can but mislead-these are all that we can give to it now. Shall we therefore miss the decisive moment? Do gentlemen hope to escape sacrifices and taxation by a plunge into national bankruptcy? What, then, is bankruptcy, but the most cruel, the most iniquitous, most unequal and disastrous of imposts? Listen to me for one moment!

Two centuries of plunder and abuse have dug the abyss which threatens to engulf the nation. It must be filled up-this terrible chasm. But how? Here is a list of proprietors. Choose from the wealthiest, in order that the smallest number of citizens may be sacrificed. But choose! Shall not a few perish, that the mass of the people may be saved? Come, then! Here are two thousand notables, whose property will supply the deficit. Restore order to your finances; peace and prosperity to the kingdom! Strike! Immolate, without mercy, these unfortunate victims! Hurl them into the abyss!-It closes!

Haphazard conjectures, insignificant inquiries, gropings that can but mislead-these are all that we can give to it now.

You recoil with dismay from the contemplation. Inconsistent and pusillanimous! What! Do you not perceive that, in decreeing a public bankruptcy, or, what is worse, in rendering it inevitable without decreeing it, you disgrace yourselves by an act a thousand times more criminal, and-folly inconceivable!-gratuitously criminal? For, in the shocking alternative I have supposed, at least the deficit would be wiped off.

But do you imagine that, in refusing to pay, you shall cease to owe? Think you that the thousands, the millions of men, who will lose in an instant, by the terrible explosion of a bankruptcy, or its revulsion, all that formed the consolation of their lives, and perhaps their sole means of subsistence-think you that they will leave you to the peaceable fruition of your crime? Stoical spectators of the incalculable evils which this catastrophe would disgorge upon France; impenetrable egotists, who fancy that these convulsions of despair and of misery will pass, as other calamities have passed-and all the more rapidly because of their intense violence-are you, indeed, certain that so many men without bread will leave you tranquilly to the enjoyment of those savory viands, the number and delicacy of which you are so loath to diminish? No! you will perish, and, in the universal conflagration, which you do not shrink from kindling, you will not, in losing your honor, save a single one of your detestable indulgences. This is the way we are going.