Posterity
His son Jean Louis Mallet (John Lewis Mallet) (1775-1861) spent a useful life in the English civil service, becoming secretary of the Board of Audit (the Audit Office); and Mallet's second son, Sir Louis Mallet (1823-1890) also entered the civil service in the Board of Trade and rose to be a distinguished economist and a member of the Council of India.
Mallet du Pan's Mémoires et correspondance was edited by A Sayous (Paris, 1851). See Mallet du Pan and the French Revolution (1902), by Bernard Mallet, son of Sir Louis Mallet, author also of a biography of his father (1900).
He is known for coining the adage "the Revolution devours its children", which originally appeared as "A l'exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants" in his widely circulated 1793 essay Considérations sur la nature de la Révolution de France, et sur les causes qui en prolongent la durée. Translated in English at the time, the essay is known to have been read by and influenced William Pitt's views.
Read more about this topic: Jacques Mallet Du Pan
Famous quotes containing the word posterity:
“The sensible author writes for no other posterity than his own—that is, for his age—so as to be able even then to take pleasure in himself.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“When posterity judges our actions here it will perhaps see us not as unwilling prisoners but as men who for whatever reason preferred to remain non-contributing individuals on the edge of society.”
—George Lucas (b. 1944)
“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)