The French Revolution, Volume 2

In this disorganized society, in which the passions of the people are the sole real force, authority belongs to the party that understands how to flatter and take advantage of these. As the legal government can neither repress nor gratify them, an illegal government arises which sanctions, excites, and directs these passions. While the former totters and falls to pieces, the latter grows stronger and improves its organization, until, becoming legal in its turn, it takes the other's place.

Principle of the revolutionary party. -- Its applications.

As a justification of these popular outbreaks and assaults, we discover at the outset a theory, which is neither improvised, added to, nor superficial, but now firmly fixed in the public mind. It has for a long time been nourished by philosophical discussions. It is a sort of enduring, long-lived root out of which the new constitutional tree has arisen. It is the dogma of popular sovereignty. -- Literally interpreted, it means that the government is merely an inferior clerk or servant.¹ We, the people, have established the government; and ever since, as well as before its organization, we are its masters. Between it and us no infinite or long lasting "contract". "None which cannot be done away with by mutual consent or through the unfaithfulness of one of the two parties." Whatever it may be, or provide for, we are nowise bound by it; it depends wholly on us. We remain free to "modify, restrict, and resume as we please the power of which we have made it the depository." Through a primordial and inalienable title deed the commonwealth belongs to us and to us only. If we put this into the hands of the government it is as when kings delegate authority for the time being to a minister He is always tempted to abuse; it is our business to watch him, warn him, check him, curb him, and, if necessary, displace him. We must especially guard ourselves against the craft and maneuvers by which, under the pretext of preserving law and order, he would tie our hands. A law, superior to any he can make, forbids him to interfere with our sovereignty; and he does interfere with it when he undertakes to forestall, obstruct, or impede its exercise. The Assembly, even the Constituent, usurps when it treats the people like a lazybones (roi fainéant), when it subjects them to laws, which they have not ratified, and when it deprives them of action except through their representatives.² The people themselves must act directly, must assemble together and deliberate on public affairs. They must control and censure the acts of those they elect; they must influence these with their resolutions, correct their mistakes with their good sense, atone for their weakness by their energy, stand at the helm alongside of them, and even employ force and throw them overboard, so that the ship may be saved, which, in their hands, is drifting on a rock.³

Such, in fact, is the doctrine of the popular party. This doctrine is carried into effect July 14 and October 5 and 6, 1789. Loustalot, Camille Desmoulins, Fréron, Danton, Marat, Pétion, Robespierre proclaim it untiringly in the political clubs, in the newspapers, and in the assembly. The government, according to them, whether local or central, trespasses everywhere. Why, after having overthrown one despotism, should we install another? We are freed from the yoke of a privileged aristocracy, but we still suffer from "the aristocracy of our representatives."⁴ Already at Paris, "the population is nothing, while the municipality is everything". It encroaches on our imprescriptible rights in refusing to let a district revoke at will the five members elected to represent it at the Hôtel-de-Ville, in passing ordinances without obtaining the approval of voters, in preventing citizens from assembling where they please, in interrupting the out-door meetings of the clubs in the Palais Royal where "Patriots are driven away be the patrol." Mayor Bailly, "who keeps liveried servants, who gives himself a salary of 110,000 livres," who distributes captains' commissions, who forces peddlers to wear metallic badges, and who compels newspapers to have signatures to their articles is not only a tyrant, but a crook, thief and "guilty of lése-nation." -- Worse are the abuses of the National Assembly. To swear fidelity to the constitution, as this body has just done, to impose its work on us, forcing us to take a similar oath, disregarding our superior rights to veto or ratify their decisions,⁵ is to "slight and scorn our sovereignty". By substituting the will of 1200 individuals for that of the people, "our representatives have failed to treat us with respect." This is not the first time, and it is not to be the last. Often do they exceed their mandate, they disarm, mutilate, and gag their legitimate sovereign and they pass decrees against the people in the people's name. Such is their martial law, specially devised for "suppressing the uprising of citizens", that is to say, the only means left to us against conspirators, monopolists, and traitors. Such a decree against publishing any kind of joint placard or petition, is a decree "null and void," and "constitutes a most flagrant attack on the nation's rights."⁶ Especially is the electoral law one of these, a law which, requiring a small qualification tax for electors and a larger one for those who are eligible, "consecrates the aristocracy of wealth." The poor, who are excluded by the decree, must regard it as invalid; register themselves as they please and vote without scruple, because natural law has precedence over written law. It would simply be "fair reprisal" if, at the end of the session, the millions of citizens lately deprived of their vote unjustly, should seize the usurping majority by the threat and tell them:

"You cut us off from society in your chamber, because you are the strongest there; we, in our turn, cut you off from the living society, because we are strongest in the street. You have killed us civilly -- we kill you physically."

Accordingly, from this point of view, all riots are legitimate. Robespierre from the rostrum⁷ excuses jacqueries, refuses to call castle-burners brigands, and justifies the insurgents of Soissons, Nancy, Avignon, and the colonies. Desmoulins, alluding to two men hung at Douai, states that it was done by the people and soldiers combined, and declares that: "Henceforth, -- I have no hesitation in saying it -- they have legitimated the insurrection;" they were guilty, and it was well to hang them.⁸ Not only do the party leaders excuse assassinations, but they provoke them. Desmoulins, "attorney-general of the Lantern, insists on each of the 83 departments being threatened with at least one lamppost hanging." (This sobriquet is bestowed on Desmoulins on account of his advocacy of street executions, the victims of revolutionary passions being often hung at the nearest lanterne, or street lamp, at that time in Paris suspended across the street by ropes or chains. -- (Tr.)) Meanwhile Marat, in the name of principle, constantly sounds the alarm in his journal:

"When public safety is in peril, the people must take power out of the hands of those whom it is entrusted . . . Put that Austrian woman and her brother-in-law in prison . . . Seize the ministers and their clerks and put them in irons . . . Make sure of the mayor and his lieutenants; keep the general in sight, and arrests his staff. . . The heir to the throne has no rights to a dinner while you want bread. Organize bodies of armed men. March to the National Assembly and demand food at once, supplied to you out of the national stocks. . . Demand that the nation's poor have a future secured to them out of the national contribution. If you are refused join the army, take the land, as well as gold which the rascals who want to force you to come to terms by hunger have buried and share it amongst you. Off with the heads of the ministers and their underlings, for now is the time; that of Lafayette and of every rascal on his staff, and of every unpatriotic battalion officer, including Bailly and those municipal reactionaries -- all the traitors in the National Assembly!"

Marat, indeed, still passes for a furious ranter among people of some intelligence. But for all that, this is the sum and substance of his theory: It installs in the political establishment, over the heads of delegated, regular, and legal powers an anonymous, imbecile, and terrific power whose decisions are absolute, whose projects are constantly adopted, and whose intervention is sanguinary. This power is that of the crowd, of a ferocious, suspicious sultan, who, appointing his viziers, keeps his hands free to direct them and his scimitar ready sharpened to cut of their heads.

Formation of the Jacobins. -- The common human elements of his character. -- Conceit and dogmatism are sensitive and rebellious in every community. -- How kept down in all well-founded societies. -- Their development in the new order of things. -Effect of milieu on imagination and ambitions. -- The stimulants of Utopianism, abuses of speech, and derangement of ideas. -- Changes in office; interests playing upon and perverted feeling.

That a speculator in his closet should have concocted such a theory is comprehensible; paper will take all that is put upon it, while abstract beings, the hollow simulacra and philosophic puppets he concocts, are adapted to every sort of combination. -- That a lunatic in his cell should adopt and preach this theory is also comprehensible; he is beset with phantoms and lives outside the actual world, and, moreover in this ever-agitated democracy he is the eternal informer and instigator of every riot and murder that takes place; he it is who under the name of "the people's friend" becomes the arbiter of lives and the veritable sovereign. -- That a people borne down with taxes, wretched and starving, indoctrinated by public speakers and sophists, should have welcomed this theory and acted under it is again comprehensible; necessity knows no law, and where the is oppression, that doctrine is true which serves to throw oppression off.

But that public men, legislators and statesmen, with, at last, ministers and heads of the government, should have made this theory their own;

* that they should have more fondly clung to it as it became more destructive;

* that, daily for three years they should have seen social order crumbling away piecemeal under its blows and not have recognized it as the instrument of such vast ruin;

* that, in the light of the most disastrous experience, instead of regarding it as a curse they should have glorified it as a boon;

* that many of them -- an entire party; almost all of the Assembly -- should have venerated it as a religious dogma and carried it to extremes with enthusiasm and rigor of faith;

* that, driven by it into a narrow strait, ever getting narrower and narrower, they should have continued to crush each other at every step;

* that, finally, on reaching the visionary temple of their so-called liberty, they should have found themselves in a slaughter-house, and, within its precincts, should have become in turn butcher and brute;

* that, through their maxims of a universal and perfect liberty they should have inaugurated a despotism worthy of Dahomey, a tribunal like that of the Inquisition, and raised human hecatombs like those of ancient Mexico;

* that amidst their prisons and scaffolds they should persist in believing in the righteousness of their cause, in their own humanity, in their virtue, and, on their fall, have regarded themselves as martyrs --

is certainly strange. Such intellectual aberration, such excessive conceit are rarely encountered, and a concurrence of circumstances, the like of which has never been seen in the world but once, was necessary to produce it.⁸

Extravagant conceit and dogmatism, however, are not rare in the human species. These two roots of the Jacobin intellect exist in all countries, underground and indestructible. Everywhere they are kept from sprouting by the established order of things; everywhere are they striving to overturn old historic foundations, which press them down. Now, as in the past, students live in garrets, bohemians in lodgings, physicians without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely offices, so many Brissots, Dantons, Marats, Robespierres, and St. Justs in embryo; only, for lack of air and sunshine, they never come to maturity. At twenty, on entering society, a young man's judgment and pride are extremely sensitive. -- Firstly, let his society be what it will, it is for him a scandal to pure reason: for it was not organized by a legislative philosopher in accordance with a sound principle, but is the work of one generation after another, according to manifold and changing necessities. It is not a product of logic, but of history, and the new-fledged thinker shrugs his shoulders as he looks up and sees what the ancient tenement is, the foundations of which are arbitrary, its architecture confused, and its many repairs plainly visible. -- In the second place, whatever degree of perfection preceding institutions, laws, and customs have reached, these have not received his approval; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him, he is being subjected beforehand to moral, political, and social forms which pleased them. Whether they please him or not is of no consequence. Like a horse trotting along between the poles of a wagon in the harness that happens to have been put on his back, he has to make best of it. -- Besides, whatever its organization, as it is essentially a hierarchy, he is nearly always subaltern in it, and must ever remain so, either soldier, corporal or sergeant. Even under the most liberal system, that in which the highest grades are accessible to all, for every five or six men who take the lead or command others, one hundred thousand must follow or be commanded. This makes it vain to tell every conscript that he carriers a marshal's baton in his sack, when, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, he discovers too late, on rummaging his sack, that the baton is not there. -- It is not surprising that he is tempted to kick against social barriers within which, willing or not, he is enrolled, and which predestine him to subordination. It is not surprising that on emerging from traditional influences he should accept a theory, which subjects these arrangements to his judgment and gives him authority over his superiors. And all the more because there is no doctrine more simple and better adapted to his inexperience, it is the only one he can comprehend and manage off-hand. Hence it is that young men on leaving college, especially those who have their way to make in the world, are more or less Jacobin, -- it is a disorder of growing up.⁹ -- In well organized communities this ailment is beneficial, and soon cured. The public establishment being substantial and carefully guarded, malcontents soon discover that they have not enough strength to pull it down, and that on contending with its guardians they gain nothing but blows. After some grumbling, they too enter at one or the other of its doors, find a place for themselves, and enjoy its advantages or become reconciled to their lot. Finally, either through imitation, or habit, or calculation, they willingly form part of that garrison which, in protecting public interests, protects their own private interests as well. Generally, after ten years have gone by, the young man has obtained his rank in the file, where he advances step by step in his own compartment, which he no longer thinks of tearing to pieces, and under the eye of a policeman who he no longer thinks of condemning. He even sometimes thinks that policeman and compartment are useful to him. Should he consider the millions of individuals who are trying to mount the social ladder, each striving to get ahead of the other, it may dawn upon him that the worst of calamities would be a lack of barriers and of guardians.

Here the worm-eaten barriers have cracked all at once, their easy- going, timid, incapable guardians having allowed things to take their course. Society, accordingly, disintegrated and a pell-mell, is turned into a turbulent, shouting crowd, each pushing and being pushed, all alike over-excited and congratulating each other on having finally obtained elbow-room, and all demanding the new barriers shall be as fragile and the new guardians as feeble, as defenseless, and as inert as possible. This is what has been done. As a natural consequence, those who were foremost in the rank have been relegated to the last; many have been struck down in the fray, while in this permanent state of disorder, which goes under the name of lasting order, elegant footwear continue to be stamped upon by hobnailed boots and wooden shoes. -- The fanatic and the intemperate egoists can now let themselves go. They are no longer subject to any ancient institutions, nor any armed might which can restrain them. On the contrary, the new constitution, through its theoretical declarations and the practical application of these, invites them to let themselves go. -- For, on the one hand, legally, it declares to be based upon pure reason, beginning with a long string of abstract dogmas from which its positive prescriptions are assumed to be rigorously deduced. As a consequence all laws are submitted to the shallow comments of reasoners and quibblers who will both interpret and break them according to the principles.¹⁰ -- On the other hand, as a matter of fact, it hands over all government powers to the elections and confers on the clubs the control of the authorities: which is to offer a premium to the presumption of the ambitious who put themselves forward because they think themselves capable, and who defame their rulers purposely to displace them. -- Every government department, organization or administrative system is like a hothouse which serves to favor some species of the human plant and wither others. This one is the best one for the propagation and rapid increase of the coffee- house politician, club haranguer, the stump-speaker, the street- rioter, the committee dictator -- in short, the revolutionary and the tyrant. In this political hothouse wild dreams and conceit will assume monstrous proportions, and, in a few months, brains that are now only ardent become hotheads.

Let us trace the effect of this excessive, unhealthy temperature on imaginations and ambitions. The old tenement is down; the foundations of the new one are not yet laid; society has to be made over again from top to bottom. All willing men are asked to come and help, and, as one plain principle suffices in drawing a plan, the first comer may succeed. Henceforth political fancies swarm in the district meetings, in the clubs, in the newspapers, in pamphlets, and in every head-long, venturesome brain.

"There is not a merchant's clerk educated by reading the 'Nouvelle Héloise,'¹¹ not a school teacher that has translated ten pages of Livy, not an artist that has leafed through Rollin, not an aesthete converted into journalists by committing to memory the riddles of the 'Contrat Social,' who does not draft a constitution. . . As nothing is easier than to perfect a daydream, all perturbed minds gather, and become excited, in this ideal realm. They start out with curiosity and end up with enthusiasm. The man in the street rushes to the enterprise in the same manner as a miser to a conjurer promising treasures, and, thus childishly attracted, each hopes to find at once, what has never been seen under even the most liberal governments: perpetual perfection, universal brotherhood, the power of acquiring what one lacks, and a life composed wholly of enjoyment."

One of these pleasures, and a keen one, is to daydream. One soars in space. By means of eight or ten ready-made sentences, found in the six-penny catechisms circulated by thousands in the country and in the suburbs of the towns and cities,¹² a village attorney, a customs clerk, a theater attendant, a sergeant of a soldier's mess, becomes a legislator and philosopher. He criticizes Malouet, Mirabeau, the Ministry, the King, the Assembly, the Church, foreign Cabinets, France, and all Europe. Consequently, on these important subjects, which always seemed forever forbidden to him, he offers resolutions, reads addresses, makes harangues, obtains applause, and congratulates himself on having argued so well and with such big words. To hold fort on questions that are not understood is now an occupation, a matter of pride and profit.

"More is uttered in one day," says an eye-witness,¹³ "in one section of Paris than in one year in all the Swiss political assemblies put together. An Englishman would give six weeks of study to what we dispose of in a quarter of an hour."

Everywhere, in the town halls, in popular meetings, in the sectional assemblies, in the wine shops, on the public promenades, on street corners vanity erects a tribune of verbosity.

"Contemplate the incalculable activity of such a machine in a loquacious nation where the passion for being something dominates all other affections, where vanity has more phases than there are starts in the firmament, where reputations already cost no more than the trouble of insisting on their being deserved, where society is divided between mediocrities and their trumpeters who laud them as divinities; where so few people are content with their lot, where the corner grocer is prouder of his epaulette than the Grand Condé of his Marshal's baton, where agitation without object or resources is perpetual, where, from the floor-scrubber to the dramatist, from the academician to the simpleton who gets muddled over the evening newspaper, from the witty courtier down to his philosophic lackey, each one revises Montesquieu with the self-sufficiency of a child which, because it is learning to read, deems itself wise; where self- esteem, in disputation, caviling and sophistication, destroys all sensible conversation; where no one utters a word, but to teach, never imagining that to learn one must keep quiet; where the triumphs of a few lunatics entice every crackbrain from his den; where, with two nonsensical ideas put together out of a book that is not understood, a man assumes to have principles; where swindlers talk about morality, women of easy virtue about civism, and the most infamous of beings about the dignity of the species; where the discharged valet of a grand seignior calls himself Brutus!"

- In reality, he is Brutus in his own eyes. Let the time come and he will be so in earnest, especially against his late master; all he has to do is to give him a thrust with his pike. Until he acts out the part he spouts it, and grows excited over his own tirades; his common sense gives way to the bombastic jargon of the revolution and to declamation, which completes the Utopian performance and eases his brain of its last modicum of ballast.

It is not merely ideas which the new regime has disturbed, but it has also disordered sentiments. "Authority is transferred from the Château of Versailles and the courtier's antechamber, with no intermediary or counterpoise, to the proletariat and its flatterers."¹⁴ The whole of the staff of the old government is brusquely set aside, while a general election has brusquely installed another in is place, offices not being given to capacity, seniority, and experience, but to self-sufficiency, intrigue, and exaggeration. Not only are legal rights reduced to a common level, but natural grades are transposed; the social ladder, overthrown, is set up again bottom upwards; the first effect of the promised regeneration is "to substitute in the administration of public affairs pettifoggers for magistrates, ordinary citizens for cabinet ministers, ex-commoners for ex-nobles, rustics for soldiers, soldiers for captains, captains for generals, curés for bishops, vicars for curés, monks for vicars, brokers for financiers, empiricists for administrators, journalists for political economists, stump-orators for legislators, and the poor for the rich." -- Every species of covetousness is stimulated by this spectacle. The profusion of offices and the anticipation of vacancies "has excited the thirst for command, stimulated self-esteem, and inflamed the hopes of the most inept. A rude and grim presumption renders the fool and the ignoramus unconscious of their insignificance. They have deemed themselves capable of anything, because the law granted public functions merely to capacity. There has appeared in front of one and all an ambitious perspective; the soldier thinks only of displacing his captain, the captain of becoming general, the clerk of supplanting the chief of his department, the new-fledged attorney of being admitted to the high court, the curé of being ordained a bishop, the shallow scribbler of seating himself on the legislative bench. Offices and professions vacated by the appointment of so many upstarts afford in their turn a vast field for the ambition of the lower classes." -- Thus, step by step, owing to the reversal of social positions, is brought about a general intellectual fever.

"France is transformed into a gaming-table, where, alongside of the discontented citizen offering his stakes, sits, bold, blustering, and with fermenting brain, the pretentious subaltern rattling his dice- box. . . At the sight of a public official rising from nowhere, even the soul of a bootblack will bound with emulation." -- He has merely to push himself ahead and elbow his way to secure a ticket "in this immense lottery of popular luck, of preferment without merit, of success without talent, of apotheoses without virtues, of an infinity of places distributed by the people wholesale, and enjoyed by the people in detail." -- Political charlatans flock thither from every quarters, those taking the lead who, being most in earnest, believe in the virtue of their nostrum, and need power to impose its recipe on the community; all being saviors, all places belong to them, and especially the highest. They lay siege to these conscientiously and philanthropically ; if necessary, they will take them by assault, hold them through force, and, forcibly or otherwise, administer their cure- all to the human species.

Psychology of the Jacobin. -- His intellectual method. -- Tyranny of formulae and suppression of facts. -- Mental balance disturbed. -- Signs of this in the revolutionary language. -- Scope and expression of the Jacobin intellect. -- In what respect his method is mischievous. -- How it is successful. -- Illusions produced by it.

Such are our Jacobins, born out of social decomposition like mushrooms out of compost. Let us consider their inner organization, for they have one as formerly the Puritans; we have only to follow their dogma down to its depths, as with a sounding-line, to reach the psychological stratum in which the normal balance of faculty and sentiment is overthrown.

When a statesman, who is not wholly unworthy of that great name, finds an abstract principle in his way, as, for instance, that of popular sovereignty, he accepts it, if he accepts it at all, according to his conception of its practical bearings. He begins, accordingly, by imagining it applied and in operation. From personal recollections and such information as he can obtain, he forms an idea of some village or town, some community of moderate size in the north, in the south, or in the center of the country, for which he has to make laws. He then imagines its inhabitants acting according to his principle, that is to say, voting, mounting guard, levying taxes, and administering their own affairs. Familiar with ten or a dozen groups of this sort, which he regards as examples, he concludes by analogy as to others and the rest on the territory. Evidently it is a difficult and uncertain process; to be exact, or nearly so, requires rare powers of observation and, at each step, a great deal of tact, for a nice calculation has to be made on given quantities imperfectly ascertained and imperfectly noted!¹⁵ Any political leader who does this successfully, does it through the ripest experience associated with genius. And even then he keeps his hand on the check-rein in pushing his innovation or reform; he is almost always tentative; he applies his law only in part, gradually and provisionally; he wishes to ascertain its effect; he is always ready to stay its operation, amend it, or modify it, according to the good or ill results of experiment; the state of the human material he has to deal with is never clear to his mind, even when superior, until after many and repeated gropings. -- Now the Jacobin pursues just the opposite course. His principle is an axiom of political geometry, which always carries its own proof along with it; for, like the axioms of common geometry, it is formed out of the combination of a few simple ideas, and its evidence imposes itself at once on all minds capable of embracing in one conception the two terms of which it is the aggregate expression. Man in general, the rights of Man, the social contract, liberty, equality, reason, nature, the people, tyrants, are examples of these basic concepts: whether precise or not, they fill the brain of the new sectarian. Often these terms are merely vague and grandiose words, but that makes no difference; as soon as they meet in his brain an axiom springs out of them that can be instantly and absolutely applied on every occasion and to excess. Mankind as it is does not concern him. He does not observe them; he does not require to observe them; with closed eyes he imposes a pattern of his own on the human substance manipulated by him; the idea never enters his head of forming any previous conception of this complex, multiform, swaying material -- contemporary peasants, artisans, townspeople, curés and nobles, behind their plows, in their homes, in their shops, in their parsonages, in their mansions, with their inveterate beliefs, persistent inclinations, and powerful wills. Nothing of this enters into or lodges in his mind; all its avenues are stopped by the abstract principle which flourishes there and fills it completely. Should actual experience through the eye or ear plant some unwelcome truth forcibly in his mind, it cannot subsist there; however noisy and relentless it may be, the abstract principle drives it out;¹⁶ if need be it will distort and strangle it, considering it a slanderer since it refutes a principle which is true and undeniable in itself. Obviously, a mind of this kind is not sound; of the two faculties which should pull together harmoniously, one is degenerated and the other overgrown; facts cannot turn the scale against the theory. Charged on one side and empty on the other, the Jacobin mind turns violently over on that side to which it leans, and such is its incurable infirmity.

Consider, indeed, the authentic monuments of Jacobin thought, the "Journal des Amis de la Constitution," the gazettes of Loustalot, Desmoulins, Brissot, Condorcet, Fréron and Marat, Robespierre's, and St. Just's pamphlets and speeches, the debates in the Legislative Assembly and in the Convention, the harangues, addresses and reports of the Girondins and Montagnards, in brief, the forty volumes of extracts compiled by Buchez and Roux. Never has so much been said to so little purpose; all the truth that is uttered is drowned in the monotony and inflation of empty verbiage and vociferous bombast. One experience in this direction is sufficient.¹⁷ The historian who resorts this mass of rubbish for accurate information finds none of any account; in vain will he read kilometers of it: hardly will he there meet one fact, one instructive detail, one document which brings before his eyes a distinct personality, which shows him the real sentiments of a villager or of a gentleman, which vividly portrays the interior of a hôtel-de-ville, of a soldier's barracks, of a municipal chamber, or the character of an insurrection. To define fifteen or twenty types and situations which sum up the history of the period, we have been and shall be obliged to seek them elsewhere -- in the correspondence of local administrators, in affidavits on criminal records, in confidential reports of the police,¹⁸ and in the narratives of foreigners,¹⁹ who, prepared for it by a different education, look behind words for things, and see France beyond the "Contrat Social." This teeming France, this grand tragedy which twenty-six millions of players are performing on a stage of 26 000 square leagues, is lost to the Jacobin. His literature, as well as his brain, contain only insubstantial generalizations like those above cited, rolling out in a mere play of ideas, sometimes in concise terms when the writer happens to be a professional reasoner like Condorcet, but most frequently in a tangled, knotty style full of loose and disconnected meshes when the spokesman happens to be an improvised politician or a philosophic tyro like the ordinary deputies of the Assembly and the speakers of the clubs. It is a pedantic scholasticism set forth with fanatical rant. Its entire vocabulary consists of about a hundred words, while all ideas are reduced to one, that of man in himself: human units, all alike equal and independent, contracting together for the first time. This is their concept of society. None could be briefer, for, to arrive at it, man had to be reduced to a minimum. Never were political brains so willfully dried up. For it is the attempt to systematize and to simplify which causes their impoverishment. In that respect they go by the methods of their time and in the track of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: their outlook on life is the classic view, which, already narrow in the late philosophers, has now become even more narrow and hardened. The best representatives of the type are Condorcet,²⁰ among the Girondins, and Robespierre, among the Montagnards, both mere dogmatists and pure logicians, the latter the most remarkable and with a perfection of intellectual sterility never surpassed. -- Unquestionably, as far as the formulation of durable laws is concerned, i.e. adapting the social machinery to personalities, conditions, and circumstances; their mentality is certainly the most impotent and harmful. It is organically short-sighted, and by interposing their principles between it and reality, they shut off the horizon. Beyond their crowd and the club it distinguishes nothing, while in the vagueness and confusion of the distance it erects the hollow idols of its own Utopia. -- But when power is to be seized by assault, and a dictatorship arbitrarily exercised, the mechanical inflexibility of such a mind is useful rather than detrimental. It is not embarrassed or slowed down, like that of a statesman, by the obligation to make inquiries, to respect precedents, of looking into statistics, of calculating and tracing beforehand in different directions the near and remote consequences of its work as this affects the interests, habits, and passions of diverse classes. All this is now obsolete and superfluous: the Jacobin knows on the spot the correct form of government and the good laws. For both construction as well as for destruction, his rectilinear method is the quickest and most vigorous. For, if calm reflection is required to get at what suits twenty-six millions of living Frenchmen, a mere glance suffices to understand the desires of the abstract men of their theory. Indeed, according to the theory, men are all shaped to one pattern, nothing being left to them but an elementary will; thus defined, the philosophic robot demands liberty, equality and popular sovereignty, the maintenance of the rights of man and adhesion to the "Contrat Social." That is enough: from now on the will of the people is known, and known beforehand; a consultation among citizens previous to action is not essential; there is no obligation to await their votes. In any events, a ratification by the people is sure; and should this not be forthcoming it is owing to their ignorance, disdain or malice, in which case their response deserves to be considered as null. The best thing to do, consequently, through precaution and to protect the people from what is bad for them, is to dictate to them what is good for them. -- Here, the Jacobin might be sincere; for the men in whose behalf he claims rights are not flesh-and-blood Frenchmen, as we see them in the streets and in the fields, but men in general, as they ought to be on leaving the hands of Nature, or after the teachings of Reason. As to the former, there is no need of being scrupulous because they are infatuated with prejudices and their opinions are mere drivel; as for the latter, it is just the opposite: full of respect for the vainglorious images of his own theory, of ghosts produced by his own intellectual device, the Jacobin will always bow down to responses that he himself has provided, for, the beings that he has created are more real in his eyes than living ones and it is their suffrage on which he counts. Accordingly, viewing things in the worst lights, he has nothing against him but the momentary antipathy of a purblind generation. To offset this, he enjoys the approval of humanity, self-obtained; that of a posterity which his acts have regenerated; that of men who, thanks to him, who are again become what they should never have ceased to be. Hence, far from looking upon himself as an usurper or a tyrant, he considers himself the natural mandatory of a veritable people, the authorized executor of the common will. Marching along in the procession formed for him by this imaginary crowd, sustained by millions of metaphysical wills created by himself in his own image, he has their unanimous assent, and, like a chorus of triumphant shouts, he will fill the outward world with the inward echo of his own voice.

What the theory promises. -- How it flatters wounded self-esteem. -- The ruling passion of the Jacobin. -- Apparent both in style and conduct. -- He alone is virtuous in his own estimation, while his adversaries are vile. -- They must accordingly be put out of the way. -- Perfection of this character. -- Common sense and moral sense both perverted.

'When an ideology attracts people, it is less due to its sophistication than to the promises it holds out. It appeals more to their desires than to their intelligence; for, if the heart sometimes may be the dupe of the head, the latter is much more frequently the dupe of the former. We do not accept a system because we deem it a true one, but because the truth we find in it suits us. Political or religious fanaticism, any theological or philosophical channel in which truth flows, always has its source in some ardent longing, some secret passion, some accumulation of intense, painful desire to which a theory affords and outlet. In the Jacobin, as well as in the Puritan, there is a fountain-head of this description. What feeds this source with the Puritan is the anxieties of a disturbed conscience which, forming for itself some idea of perfect justice, becomes rigid and multiplies the commandments it believes that God has promulgated; on being constrained to disobey these it rebels, and, to impose them on others, it becomes tyrannical even to despotism. The first effort of the Puritan, however, wholly internal, is self-control; before becoming political he becomes moral. With the Jacobin, on the contrary, the first precept is not moral, political; it is not his duties which he exaggerates but his rights, while his doctrine, instead of being a prick to his conscience, flatters his pride.²¹ However vast and insatiate human pride may be, now it is satisfied, for never before has it had so much to feed upon. -- In the program of the sect, do not look for the restricted prerogatives growing out of self-respect which the proud-spirited man claims for himself, such as civil rights accompanied by those liberties that serve as sentinels and guardians of these rights -- security for life and property, the stability of the law, the integrity of courts, equality of citizens before the law and under taxation, the abolition of privileges and arbitrary proceedings, the election of representatives and the administration of public funds. Summing it up, the precious guarantees which render each citizen an inviolable sovereign on his limited domain, which protect his person and property against all species of public or private oppression and exaction, which maintain him calm and erect before competitors as well as adversaries, upright and respectful in the presence of magistrates and in the presence of the government.

A Malouet, a Mounier, a Mallet du Pan, partisans of the English Constitution and Parliament, may be content with such trifling gifts, but the Jacobin theory holds them all cheap, and, if need be, will trample them in the dust. Independence and security for the private citizen is not what it promises, not the right to vote every two years, not a moderate exercise of influence, not an indirect, limited and intermittent control of the commonwealth, but political dominion in the full and complete possession of France and the French people. There is no doubt on this point. In Rousseau's own words, the "Contrat Social" prescribes "the complete alienation to the community of each associate and all his rights," every individual surrendering himself wholly, "just as he may actually be, he himself and all his powers of which his possessions form a part," so that the state not only the recognized owner of property, but of minds and bodies as well, may forcibly and legitimately impose on every member of it such education, form of worship, religious faith, opinions and sympathies as it deems best.²² Now each man, solely because he is a man, is by right a member of this despotic sovereignty. Whatever, accordingly, my condition may be, my incompetence, my ignorance, my insignificance in the career in which I have plodded along, I have full control over the fortunes, lives, and consciences of twenty-six million French people, being accordingly Czar and Pope, according to my share of authority. -- - But if I adhere strictly to this doctrine, I am yet more so than my quota warrants. This royal prerogative with which I am endowed is only conferred on those who, like myself, sign the Social Contract in full; others, merely because they reject some clause of it, incur a forfeiture; no one must enjoy the advantages of a pact of which some of the conditions are repudiated. -- Even better, as this pact is based on natural right and is obligatory, he who rejects it or withdraws from it, becomes by that act a miscreant, a public wrong-doer and an enemy of the people. There were once crimes of royal lèse-majesty; now there are crimes of popular lèse-majesty. Such crimes are committed when by deed, word, or thought, any portion whatever of the more than royal authority belonging to the people is denied or contested. The dogma through which popular sovereignty is proclaimed thus actually ends in a dictatorship of the few, and a proscription of the many. Outside of the sect you are outside of the laws. We, the five or six thousand Jacobins of Paris, are the legitimate monarch, the infallible Pontiff, and woe betide the refractory and the lukewarm, all government agents, all private persons, the clergy, the nobles, the rich, merchants, traders, the indifferent among all classes, who, steadily opposing or yielding uncertain adhesion, dare to throw doubt on our unquestionable right.

One by one these consequences are to come into light, and it is evident that, let the logical machinery by which they unfold themselves be what it may, no ordinary person, unless of consummate vanity, will fully adopt them. He must have an exalted opinion of himself to consider himself sovereign otherwise than by his vote, to conduct public business with no more misgivings than his private business, to directly and forcibly interfere with this, to set himself up, he and his clique, as guides, censors and rulers of his government, to persuade himself that, with his mediocre education and average intellect, with his few scraps of Latin and such information as is obtained in reading-rooms, coffee-houses, and newspapers, with no other experience than that of a club, or a municipal council, he could discourse wisely and well on the vast, complex questions which superior men, specially devoted to them, hesitate to take up. At first this presumption existed in him only in germ, and, in ordinary times, it would have remained, for lack of nourishment, as dry-rot or creeping mold, But the heart knows not what strange seeds it contains! Any of these, feeble and seemingly inoffensive, needs only air and sunshine to become a noxious excrescence and a colossal plant. Whether third or fourth rate attorney, counselor, surgeon, journalist, curé, artist, or author, the Jacobin is like the shepherd that has just found, in one corner of his hut, a lot of old parchments which entitle him to the throne. What a contrasts between the meanness of his calling and the importance with which the theory invests him! With what rapture he accepts a dogma that raises him so high in his own estimation! Diligently conning the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution, all the official documents that confer on him such glorious prerogatives, charging his imagination with them, he immediately assumes a tone befitting his new position.²³ -- Nothing surpasses the haughtiness and arrogance of this tone. It declares itself at the outset in the harangues of the clubs and in the petitions to the Constituent Assembly. Loustalot, Fréron, Danton, Marat, Robespierre, St. Just, always employ dictatorial language, that of the sect, and which finally becomes the jargon of their meanest valets. Courtesy or toleration, anything that denotes regard or respect for others, find no place in their utterances nor in their acts; a swaggering, tyrannical conceit creates for itself a language in its own image, and we see not only the foremost actors, but their minor associates, enthroned on their grandiloquent platform. Each in his own eyes is Roman, savior, hero, and great man.

"I stood in the tribune of the palace," writes Anarcharsis Clootz,²⁴ "at the head of the foreigners, acting as ambassador of the human species, while the ministers of the tyrants regarded me with a jealous and disconcerted air."

A schoolmaster at Troyes, on the opening of the club in that town, advises the women "to teach their children, as soon as they can utter a word, that they are free and have equal rights with the mightiest potentates of the universe."²⁵ Pétion's account of the journey in the king's carriage, on the return from Varennes, must be read to see how far self-importance of a pedant and the self-conceit of a lout can be carried.²⁶ In their memoirs and even down to their epitaphs, Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, Roland, and Madame Roland²⁷ give themselves certificates of virtue and, if we could take their word for it, they would pass for Plutarch's model characters. -- This infatuation, from the Girondins to the Montagnards, continues to grow. St. Just, at the age of twenty-four, and merely a private individual, is already consumed with suppressed ambition. Marat says:

"I believe that I have exhausted every combination of the human intellect in relation to morality, philosophy and political science."

Robespierre, from the beginning to the end of the Revolution, is always, in his own eyes, Robespierre the unique, the one pure man, the infallible and the impeccable; no man ever burnt to himself the incense of his own praise so constantly and so directly. -- At this level, conceit may drink the theory to the bottom, however revolting the dregs and however fatal its poison even to those defy its nausea for the sake of swallowing it. And, since it is virtue, no one may refuse it without committing a crime. Thus construed, the theory divides Frenchmen into two groups: one consisting of aristocrats, fanatics, egoists, the corrupt, bad citizens in short, and the other patriots, philosophers, and the virtuous, that is to say, those belonging to the sect.²⁸ Thanks to this reduction, the vast moral and social world with which they deal finds its definition, expression, and representation in a ready-made antithesis. The aim of the government is now clear: the wicked must submit to the good, or, which is briefer, the wicked must be suppressed. To this end let us employ confiscation, imprisonment, exile, drowning and the guillotine and a large scale. All means are justifiable and meritorious against these traitors; now that the Jacobin has canonized his slaughter, he slays through philanthropy. -- Thus is the forming of his personality completed like that of a theologian who becomes inquisitor. Extraordinary contrasts are gathered to construct it: -- a lunatic that is logical, and a monster that pretends to have a conscience. Under the pressure of his faith and egotism, he has developed two deformities, one of the head and the other of the heart; his common sense is gone, and his moral sense is utterly perverted. In fixing his mind on abstract formulas, he is no longer able to see men as they are. His self-admiration makes him consider his adversaries, and even his rivals, as miscreants deserving of death. On this downhill road nothing stops him, for, in qualifying things inversely to their true meaning, he has violated within himself the precious concepts which brings us back to truth and justice. No light reaches eyes which regard blindness as clear-sightedness; no remorse affects a soul which erects barbarism into patriotism, and which sanctions murder with duty.

Formation of the party. -- Its recruits -- These are rare in the upper class and amongst the masses. -- They are numerous in the low bourgeois class and in the upper stratum of the people. -- The position and education which enroll a man in the party.

PERSONALITIES like these are found in all classes of society; no situation or position in life protects one from wild Utopia or frantic ambition. We find among the Jacobins a Barras and a Châteauneuf- Randon, two nobles of the oldest families; Condorcet, a marquis, mathematician, philosopher and member of two renowned academies; Gobel, bishop of Lydda and suffragan to the bishop of Bâle; Hérault de Séchellles, a protégé of the Queen's and attorney-general to the Paris parliament; Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, chief-justice and one of the richest land-owners in France; Charles de Hesse, major-general, born in the royal family; and, last of all, a prince of the blood and fourth personage in the realm, the Duke of Orleans. -- But, with the exception of these rare deserters, neither the hereditary aristocracy nor the upper magistracy, nor the highest of the middle class, none of the land-owners who live on their estates, or the leaders of industrial and commercial enterprises, no one belonging to the administration, none of those, in general, who are or deserve to be considered social authorities, furnish the party with recruits. All have too much at stake in the political establishment, shattered as it is, to wish its entire demolition. Their political experience, brief as it is, enables them to see at once that a habitable house is not built by merely tracing a plan of it on paper according the theorems of school geometry. -- On the other hand, among the ordinary rural population the ideology finds, unless it can be changed into a legend, no listeners. Share croppers, small holders and farmers looking after their own plots of ground, peasants and craftsmen who work too hard to think and whose minds never range beyond a village horizon, busy only with that which brings in their daily bread, find abstract doctrines unintelligible; should the dogmas of the new catechism arrest their attention the same thing happens as with the old one, they do not understand them; that mental faculty by which an abstraction is reached is not yet formed in them. On being taken to a political club they fall asleep; they open their eyes only when some one announces that tithes and feudal privileges are to be restored; they can be depended on for nothing more than a brawl and a jacquerie; later on, when their grain comes to be taxed or is taken, they prove as unruly under the republic as under the monarchy.

The believers in this theory come from other quarters, from the two extremes of the lower stratum of the middle class and the upper stratum of the low class. Again, in these two contiguous groups, which merge into each other, those must be left out who, absorbed in their daily occupations or professions, have no time or thought to give to public matters, who have reached a fair position in the social hierarchy and are not disposed to run risks, almost all of them well- established, steady-going, mature, married folks who have sown their wild oats and whom experience in life has rendered distrustful of themselves and of theories. Overweening conceit is, most of the time, only average in the average human being, so speculative ideas will with most people only obtain a loose, transient and feeble hold. Moreover, in this society which, for many centuries consists of people accustomed to being ruled, the hereditary spirit is bourgeois that is to say, used to discipline, fond of order, peaceable and even timid. -- There remains a minority, a very small one,¹ innovating and restless. This consisted, on the one hand, of people who were discontented with their calling or profession, because they were of secondary or subaltern rank in it.² Some were debutantes not fully employed and others aspirants for careers not yet entered upon. Then, on the other hand, there were the men of unstable character and all those who were uprooted by the immense upheaval of things: in the Church, through the suppression of convents and through schism; in the judiciary, in the administration, in the financial departments, in the army, and in various private and public careers, through the reorganization of institutions, through the novelty of fresh resources and occupations, and through the disturbance caused by the changed relationships of patrons and clients. Many who, in ordinary times, would otherwise remain quiet, become in this way nomadic and extravagant in politics. Among the foremost of these are found those who, through a classical education, can take in an abstract proposition and deduce its consequences, but who, for lack of special preparation for it, and confined to the narrow circle of local affairs, are incapable of forming accurate conceptions of a vast, complex social organization, and of the conditions which enable it to subsist. Their talent lies in making a speech, in dashing off an editorial, in composing a pamphlet, and in drawing up reports in more or less pompous and dogmatic style; the genre admitted, a few of them who are gifted become eloquent, but that is all. Among those are the lawyers, notaries, bailiffs and former petty provincial judges and attorneys who furnish the leading actors and two-thirds of the members of the Legislative Assembly and of the Convention: There are surgeons and doctors in small towns, like Bo, Levasseur, and Baudot, second and third-rate literary characters, like Barrère, Louvet, Garat, Manuel, and Ronsin, college professors like Louchet and Romme, schoolmasters like Leonard Bourdon, journalists like Brissot, Desmoulins and Freron, actors like Collot d'Herbois, artists like Sergent, Oratoriens³ like Fouché, capuchins like Chabot, more or less secularized priests like Lebon, Chasles, Lakanal, and Grégoire, students scarcely out of school like St. Just, Monet of Strasbourg, Rousseline of St. Albin, and Julien of the Drôme -- in short, the poorly sown and badly cultivated minds, and on which the theory had only to fall to smother the good grain and thrive like a nettle. Add to these charlatans and others who live by their wits, the visionary and morbid of all sorts, from Fanchet and Klootz to Châlier or Marat, the whole of that needy, chattering, irresponsible crowd, ever swarming about large cities ventilating its shallow conceits and abortive pretensions. Farther in the background appear those whose scanty education qualifies them to half understand an abstract principle and imperfectly deduce its consequences, but whose roughly-polished instinct atones for the feebleness of a coarse argumentation. Through cupidity, envy and rancor, they divine a rich pasture-ground behind the theory, and Jacobin dogmas become dearer to them, because the imagination sees untold treasures beyond the mists in which they are shrouded. They can listen to a club harangue without falling asleep, applaud its tirades in the rights place, offer a resolution in a public garden, shout in the tribunes, pen affidavits for arrests, compose orders-of-the-day for the national guard, and lend their lungs, arms, and sabers to whoever bids for them. But here their capacity ends. In this group merchants' and notaries' clerks abound, like Hébert and Henriot, Vincent and Chaumette, butchers like Legendre, postmasters like Drouet, boss-joiners like Duplay, school-teachers like that Buchot who becomes a minister, and many others of the same sort, accustomed to jotting down ideas, with vague notions of orthography and who are apt in speech-making,⁴ foremen, sub-officers, former begging friars, peddlers, tavern-keepers, retailers, market-porters, and city- journeymen from Gouchon, the orator of the faubourg St. Antoine, down to Simon, the cobbler of the Temple, from Trinchard, the juryman of the Revolutionary Tribunal, down to grocers, tailors, shoemakers, tapster, waiters, barbers, and other shopkeepers or artisans who do their work at home, and who are yet to do the work of the September massacres. Add to these the foul remnants of every popular insurrection and dictatorship, beasts of prey like Jourdain of Avignon, and Fournier the American, women like Théroigne, Rose Lacombe, and the tricoteuses of the Convention who have unsexed themselves, the amnestied bandits and other gallows birds who, for lack of a police, have a wide range, street-rollers and vagabonds, rebels against labor and discipline, the whole of that class in the center of civilization which preserves the instincts of savages, and asserts the sovereignty of the people to glut a natural appetite for license, laziness, and ferocity. -- Thus is the party recruited through an enlisting process that gleans its subjects from every station in life, but which reaps them down in great swaths, and gathers them together in the two groups to which dogmatism and presumption naturally belong. Here, education has brought man to the threshold, even to the heart of general ideas; consequently, he feels hampered within the narrow bounds of his profession or occupation, and aspires to something beyond. But as his education has remained superficial or rudimentary, consequently, outside of his narrow circle he feels out of his place. He has a perception or obtains a glimpse of political ideas and, therefore, assumes that he has capacity. But his perception is confided to a formula, and he sees them dimly through a cloud; hence his incapacity, and the reason why his mental lacunae as well as his attainments both contribute to make him a Jacobin.

Spontaneous associations after July 14, 1789. -- How these dissolve. - Withdrawal of people of sense and occupation. -- Number of those absent at elections. -- Birth and multiplication of Jacobin societies. -- Their influence over their adherents -- Their maneuvers and despotism.

Men thus disposed cannot fail to draw near each other, to understand each other, and combine together; for, in the principle of popular sovereignty, they have a common dogma, and, in the conquest of political supremacy, a common aim. Through a common aim they form a faction, and through a common dogma they constitute a sect, the league between them being more easily effected because they are a faction and sect at the same time.

At first their association is not distinguishable in the multitude of other associations. Political societies spring up on all sides after the taking of the Bastille. Some kind of organization had to be substituted for the deposed or tottering government, in order to provide for urgent public needs, to secure protection against ruffians, to obtain supplies of provisions, and to guard against the probably machinations of the court. Committees installed themselves in the town halls, while volunteers formed bodies of militia: hundreds of local governments, almost independent, arose in the place of the central government, almost destroyed.⁵ For six months everybody attended to matters of common interest, each individual getting to be a public personage and bearing his quota of the government load: a heavy load at all times, but heavier in times of anarchy; this, at least, is the opinion of the majority but not of all of them. Consequently, a division arises amongst those who had assumed this load, and two groups are formed, one huge, inert and disintegrating, and the other small, compact and energetic, each taking one of two ways which diverge from each other, and which keep on diverging more and more.

On one hand are the ordinary, sensible people, those who are busy, and who are, to some extent, not over-conscientious, and not over- conceited. The power is in their hands because they find it prostrate, lying abandoned in the street; they hold it provisionally only, for they knew beforehand, or soon discover, that they are not qualified for the post, it being one of those which, to be properly filled, needs some preparation and fitness for it. A man does not become legislator or administrator in one day, any more than he suddenly becomes a physician or surgeon. If an accident obliges me to act in the latter capacity, I yield, but against my will, and I do no more than is necessary to save my patients from hurting themselves, My fear of their dying under the operation is very great, and, as soon as some other person can be found to take my place, I go home.⁶ -- I should be glad, like everybody else, to have my vote in the selection of this person, and, among the candidates. I should designate, to the best of my ability, one who seemed to me the ablest and most conscientious. Once selected, however, and installed, I should not attempt to dictate to him; his cabinet is private, and I have no right to run there constantly and cross-question him, as if he were a child or under suspicion. It does not become me to tell him what to do; he probably knows more about the case than I do; in any event, to keep a steady hand, he must not be threatened, and, to keep a clear head, he must not be disturbed. Nor must I be disturbed; my office and books, my shop, my customers must be attended to as well. Everybody has to mind his own business, and whoever would attend to his own and another's too, spoils both. -- This way of thinking prevails with most healthy minds towards the beginning of the year 1790, all whose heads are not turned by insane ambition and the mania for theorizing, especially after six months of practical experience and knowing the dangers, miscalculation, and vexations to which one is exposed in trying to lead an eager, over-excited population. -- Just at this time, December 1789, municipal law becomes established throughout the country; all the mayors and municipal officers are elected almost immediately, and in the following months, all administrators of districts and departments. The interregnum has a length come to an end. Legal authorities now exist, with legitimate and clearly-determined functions. Reasonable, honest people gladly turn power over to those to whom it belongs, and certainly do not dream of resuming it. All associations for temporary purposes are at once disbanded for lack of an object, and if others are formed, it is for the purpose of defending established institutions. This is the object of the Federation, and, for six months, people embrace each other and exchange oaths of fidelity. -- After this, July 14, 1790, they retire into private life, and I have no doubt that, from this date, the political ambition of a large plurality of the French people is satisfied, for, although Rousseau's denunciation of the social hierarchy are still cited by them, they, at bottom, desire but little more than the suppression of administrative brutality and state favoritism.⁷ All this is obtained, and plenty of other things besides; the august title of sovereign, the respect of the public authorities, honors to all who wield a pen or make a speech, and, better still, actual sovereignty in the appointment to office of all local land national administrators; not only do the people elect their deputies, but every species of functionary of every degree, those of commune, district, and department, officers in the national guard, civil and criminal magistrates, bishops and priests. Again, to ensure the responsibility of the elected to their electors, the term of office fixed by law is a short one,⁸ the electoral machine which summons the sovereign to exercise his sovereignty being set agoing about every four months. -- This was a good deal, and too much, as the sovereign himself soon discovers. Voting so frequently becomes unendurable; so many prerogatives end in getting to be drudgery. Early in 1790, and after this date, the majority forego the privilege of voting and the number of absentees becomes enormous. At Chartres, in May, 1790,⁹ 1,447 out of 1,551 voters do not attend preliminary meetings. At Besançon, in January, 1790, on the election of mayor and municipal officers, 2,141 out of 3,200 registered electors are recorded as absent from the polls, and 2,900 in the following month of November.¹⁰ At Grenoble, in August and November of this year, out of 2,500 registered voters, more than 2,000 are noted as absent.¹¹ At Limoges, out of about the same number, there are only 150 voters. At Paris, out of 81,400 electors, in August, 1790, 67,200 do not vote, and, three months later, the number of absentees is 71 ,408.¹²

Thus for every elector that votes, there are four, six, eight, ten, and even sixteen that abstain from voting. -- In the election of deputies, the case is the same. At the primary meetings of 1791, in Paris, out of 81,200 registered names more than 74,000 fail to respond. In the Doubs, three out of four voters stay away. In one of the cantons of the Côte d'Or, at the close of the polls, only one- eighth of the electors remain at the counting of the votes, while in the secondary meetings the desertion is not less. At Paris, out of 946 electors chosen only 200 are found to give their suffrage; at Rouen, out of 700 there are but 160, and on the last day of the ballot, only 60. In short, "in all departments," says an orator in the tribune, "scarcely one out of five electors of the second degree discharges his duty."

In this manner the majority hands in its resignation. Through inertia, want of forethought, lassitude, aversion to the electoral hubbub, lack of political preferences, or dislike of all the political candidates, it shirks the task which the constitution imposes on it. Most certainly is has no taste for the painstaking burden of being involved in a league (of human rights). Men who cannot find time once in three months to drop a ballot in the box, will not come three times a week to attend the meetings of a club. Far from meddling with the government, they abdicate, and as they refuse to elect it, they cannot undertake to control it.

It is, on the other hand, just the opposite with the upstarts and dogmatists who regard their royal privileges seriously. They not only vote at the elections, but they mean to keep the authority they delegate in their own hands. In their eyes every official is one of their creatures, and remains accountable to them, for, in point of law, the people may not part with their sovereignty, while, in fact, power has proved so sweet that they are not disposed to part with it.¹³ During six months preceding the regular elections, they have come to know, comprehend, and test each other; they have held secret meetings; a mutual understanding is arrived at, and henceforth, as other associations disappear like fleeting bloom, theirs¹⁴ rise vigorously on the abandoned soil. A club is established at Marseilles before the end of 1789; each large town has one within the first six months of 1790, Aix in February, Montpellier in March, Nîmes in April, Lyons in May, and Bordeaux in June.¹⁵ But their greatest increase takes place after the Federation festival. Just when local gatherings merge into that of the whole country, the sectarian Jacobins keep aloof, and form leagues of their own. At Rouen, July 14, 1790, two surgeons, a printer, a chaplain at the prison, a widowed Jewess, and four women or children living in the house, -- eight persons in all, pure and not to be confounded with the mass,¹⁶ bind themselves together, and form a distinct association. Their patriotism is of superior quality, and they take a special view of the social compact;¹⁷ in swearing fealty to the constitution they reserve to themselves the Rights of Man, and they mean to maintain not only the reforms already effected, but to complete the Revolution just begun. -- During the Federation they have welcomed and indoctrinated their fellows who, on quitting the capital or large cities, become bearers of instructions to the small towns and hamlets; they are told what the object of a club is, and how to form one, and, everywhere, popular associations arise on the same plan, for the same purpose, and bearing the same name. A month later, sixty of these associations are in operation; three months later, one hundred; in March, 1791, two hundred and twenty-nine, and in August, 1791, nearly four hundred.¹⁸ After this date a sudden increase takes place, owing to two simultaneous impulses, which scatter their seeds over the entire territory. -- On the one hand, at then end of July, 1791, all moderate men, the friends of law and order, who still hold the clubs in check, all constitutionalists, or Feuillants, withdraw from them and leave them to exaggeration or the triviality of proposing motions; the political tone immediately falls to that of the tavern and guard- house, so that wherever one or the other is found, there is a political club. On the other hand, a convocation of the electoral body is held at the same date for the election of a new National Assembly, and for the renewal of local governments; the prey being in sight, hunting-parties are everywhere formed to capture it. In two months,¹⁹ six hundred new clubs spring up; by the end of September they amount to one thousand, and in June, 1792, to twelve hundred -- as many as there are towns and walled boroughs. On the fall of the throne, and at the panic caused by the Prussian invasion, during a period of anarchy which equaled that of July, 1789, there were, according to Roederer, almost as many clubs as there were communes, 26,000, one for every village containing five or six hot-headed, boisterous fellows, or roughs, (tape-durs), with a clerk able to pen a petition.

After November, 1790,²⁰ "every street in every town and hamlet," says a Journal of large circulation, "must have a club of its own. Let some honest craftsman invite his neighbors to his house, where, with using a shared candle, he may read aloud the decrees of the National Assembly, on which he and his neighbors may comment. Before the meeting closes, in order to enliven the company, which may feel a little disturbed on account of Marat's articles, let him read the patriotic oaths in 'Pêre Duchesne.'"²¹ -- The advice is followed. At the meetings in the club are read aloud pamphlets, newspapers, and catechisms dispatched from Paris, the "Gazette Villageoise," the "Journal du Soir," the "Journal de la Montagne," "Pêre Duchesne," the "Révolutions de Paris," and "Laclos' Gazette." Revolutionary songs are sung, and, if a good speaker happens to be present, a former monk (oratorien), lawyer, or school-master, he pours out his stock of phrases, speaking of the Greeks and Romans, proclaiming the regeneration of the human species. One of them, appealing to the women, wants to see

"the declaration of the Rights of Man suspended on the walls of their bedrooms as their principal ornament, and, should war break out, these virtuous supporters, marching at the head of our armies like new bacchantes with flowing hair, the wand of Bacchus in their hand."

Shouts of applause greet this sentiment. The minds of the listeners, swept away by this gale of declamation, become overheated and ignite through mutual contact; like half-consumed embers that would die out if let alone, they kindle into a blaze when gathered together in a heap. -- Their convictions, at the same time, gain strength. There is nothing like a coterie to make these take root. In politics, as in religion, faith generating the church, the latter, in its turn, nourishes faith. In the club, as in the private religious meeting, each derives authority from the common unanimity, every word and action of the whole tending to prove each in the right. And all the more because a dogma which remains uncontested, ends in seeming incontestable; as the Jacobin lives in a narrow circle, carefully guarded, no contrary opinions find their way to him. The public, in his eyes, seems two hundred persons; their opinion weighs on him without any counterpoise, and, outside of their belief, which is his also, every other belief is absurd and even culpable. Moreover, he discovers through this constant system of preaching, which is nothing but flattery, that he is patriotic, intelligent, virtuous, of which he can have no doubt, because, before being admitted into the club, his civic virtues have been verified and he carries a printed certificate of them in his pocket. -- Accordingly, he is one of an élite corps, a corps which, enjoying a monopoly of patriotism, holds itself aloof, talks loud, and is distinguished from ordinary citizens by its tone and way of conducting things. The club of Pontarlier,²² from the first, prohibits its members from using the common forms of politeness.

"Members are to abstain from saluting their fellow-citizens by removing the hat, and are to avoid the phrase, 'I have the honor to be,' and others of like import, in addressing persons."

A proper idea of one's importance is indispensable.

"Does not the famous tribune of the Jacobins in Paris inspire traitors and impostors with fear? And do not anti-Revolutionaries return to dust on beholding it?"

All this is true, in the provinces as well as at the capital, for, scarcely is a club organized before it sets to work on the population. In may of the large cities, in Paris, Lyons, Aix and Bordeaux, there are two clubs in partnership,²³ one, more or less respectable and parliamentary, "composed partly of the members of the different branches of the administration and specially devoted to purposes of general utility," and the other, practical and active, made up of bar- room politicians and club-haranguers, who indoctrinate workmen, market-gardeners and the rest of the lower bourgeois class. The latter is a branch of the former, and, in urgent cases, supplies it with rioters.

"We are placed amongst the people," says one of these subaltern clubs, "we read to them the decrees, and, through lectures and counsel, we warn them against the publications and intrigues of the aristocrats. We ferret out and track plotters and their machinations. We welcome and advise all complainants; we enforce their demands, when just; finally, we, in some way, attend to all details."

Thanks to these vulgar auxiliaries, but whose lungs and arms are strong, the party soon becomes dominant; it has force and uses it, and, denying that its adversaries have any rights, it re-establishes all the privileges for its own advantage.²⁴

How they view the liberty of the press. -- Their political doings.

Let us consider its mode of procedure in one instance and upon a limited field, the freedom of the press.²⁵ In December, 1790, M. Etienne, an engineer, whom Marat and Fréron had denounced as a spy in their periodicals, brought a suit against them in the police court. The numbers containing the libel were seized, the printers summoned to appear, and M. Etienne claimed a public retraction or 25,000 francs damages with costs. At this the two journalists, considering themselves infallible as well as exempt from arrest, are indignant.

" It is of the utmost importance," writes Marat, "that the informer should not be liable to prosecution as he is accountable only to the public for what he says and does for the public good."

M. Etienne (surnamed Languedoc), therefore, is a traitor: "Monsieur Languedoc, I advise you to keep your mouth shut; if I can have you hung I will." M. Etienne, nevertheless, persists and obtains a first decision in his favor. Fire and flame are at once belched forth by Marat and Fréon:

"Master Thorillon," exclaims Fréron to the commissary of police, "you shall be punished and held up to the people as an example; this infamous decision must be canceled." -- "Citizens," writes Marat, "go in a body to the Hôtel-de-Ville and do not allow one of the guards to enter the court-room. " -- On the day of the trial, and in the most condescending spirit, but two grenadiers are let in. Even these, however, are too many and shouts from the Jacobin crowd arise "Turn 'em out! We rule here," upon which the two grenadiers withdraw. On the other hand, says Fréron triumphantly, that there were in the court- room "sixty of the victors at the Bastille led by the brave Santerre, who intended to interfere in the trial." -- They intervene, indeed, and first against the plaintiff. M. Etienne is attacked at the entrance of the court-room and nearly knocked down He is so maltreated that he is obliged to seek shelter in the guard-room. He is spit upon, and they "move to cut off his ears." His friends receive "hundreds of kicks," while he runs away, and the case is postponed. -- It is called up again several times, so no the judges have to be restrained. A certain Mandart in the audience, author of a pamphlet on "Popular Sovereignty," springs to his feet and, addressing Bailly, mayor of Paris, and president of the tribunal, challenges the court. As usual Bailly yields, attempting to cover up his weakness with an honorable pretext: "Although a judge can be challenged only by the parties to a suit, the appeal of one citizen is sufficient for me and I leave the bench." The other judges, who are likewise insulted and menaced, yield also, and, through a sophism which admirably illustrates the times, they discover in the oppression to which the plaintiff is subject a legal device by which they can give a fair color to their denial of justice. M. Etienne having signified to them that neither he nor his counsel could attend in court, because their lives were in danger, the court decides that M. Etienne, "failing to appear in person, or by counsel, is non-suited." -- Victorious shouts at once proceed from the two journalists, while their articles on the case disseminated throughout France set a precedence contained in the .ruling. Any Jacobin may after this with impunity denounce, insult, and calumniate whomsoever he pleases, sheltered as he is from the action of courts, and held superior to the law.

Let us see, on the other hand, what liberty they allow their adversaries. A fortnight before this, Mallet du Pan, a writer of great ability, who, in the best periodical of the day, discusses questions week after week free of all personalities, the most independent, straight-forward, and honorable of men, the most eloquent and judicious advocate of public order and true liberty, is waited upon by a deputation from the Palais-Royal,²⁶ consisting of about a dozen well-dressed individuals, civil enough and not too ill-disposed, but quite satisfied that they have a right to interfere. The conversation which ensues shows to what extent the current political creed had turned peoples' heads.

"One of the party, addressing me, informed me that he and his associates were deputies of the Palais-Royal clubs, and that they had called to notify me that I would do well to change my principles and stop attacking the constitution, otherwise extreme violence would be brought to bear on me. I replied that I recognized no authority but the law and that of the courts; the law is your master and mine, and no respect is shown to the constitution by assailing the freedom of the press."

"The constitution is the common will, resumed the spokesman. The law, is the authority of the strongest. You are subject to the strongest and you ought to submit. We notify you of the will of the nation and that is the law.'"

Mallet du Pan stated to them that he was not in favor of the ancient régime, but that he did approve of royal authority.

"Oh!" exclaimed all together, " we should be sorry not to have a king. We respect the King and maintain his authority. But you are forbidden to oppose the dominant opinion and the liberty which is decreed by the National Assembly."

Mallet du Pan, apparently, knows more about this than they do, for he is a Swiss by birth, and has lived under a republic for twenty years. But this does not concern them. They persist all the same, five or six talking at once, misconstruing the sense the words they use, and each contradicting the other in point of detail, but all agreeing to impose silence on him:

"You should not run counter to the popular will, for in doing this you preach civil war, bring the assembly's decrees into contempt, and irritate the nation."

Evidently, for them, they constitute the nation, or, more or less, they represent it. Through this self-investiture they are at once magistrates, censors, and police, while the scolded journalist is only too glad, in his case, to have them stop at injunctions. -- Three days before this he is advised that a body of rioters in his neighborhood "threatened to treat his house like that of M. de Castries," in which everything had been smashed and thrown out the windows. At another time, apropos of the suspensive or absolute veto; "four savage fellows came to his domicile to warn him, showing him their pistols, that if he dared write in behalf of M. Mounier he should answer for it with his life." Thus, from the outset,

"just as the nation begins to enjoy the inestimable right of free thought and free speech, factional tyrants lose no time in depriving citizens of these, proclaiming to all that would maintain the integrity of their consciences: Tremble, die, or believe as we do!"

After this, to impose silence on those who express what is offensive, the crowd, the club, the section, decree and execute, each on its own authority,²⁷ searches, arrests, assaults, and, at length, assassinations. During the month of June, 1792, "three decrees of arrest and fifteen denunciations, two acts of affixing seals, four civic invasions of his premises, and the confiscation of whatever belonged to him in France" is the experience of Mallet du Pan. He passes four years "without knowing with any certainty on going to bed whether he should get out of it in the morning alive and free." Later on, if he escapes the guillotine and the lantern, it is owing to exile. On the 10th of August, Suleau, a conservative journalist, is massacred in the street. -- This shows how the party regards the freedom of the press. Other liberties may be judged of by its encroachments on this domain. Law, in its eyes, is null when it proves an obstacle, and when it affords protection to adversaries; consequently there is no excess which it does not sanction for itself; and no right which it does not refuse to others.

There is no escape from the tyranny of the clubs. "That of Marseilles has forced the city officials to resign;²⁸ it has summoned the municipal body to appear before it; it has ignored the authority of the department, and has insulted the administrators of the law. Members of the Orleans club have kept the national Supreme Court under supervision, and taken part in its proceedings. Those of the Caen club have insulted the magistrates, and seized and burnt the records of the proceedings commenced against the destroyers of the statue of Louis XIV. At Alby they have forcibly abstracted from the record-office the papers relating to an assassin's trial, and burnt them." The club at Coutance gives the deputies of its district to understand that "no reflections must be cast on the laws of the people." That of Lyons stops an artillery train, under the pretext that the ministry in office does not enjoy the nation's confidence. -- Thus does the club everywhere govern, or prepare to govern. On the one hand, at the elections, it sets aside or supports candidates; it alone votes, or, at least, controls the voting. In short, the club is the elective power, and practically, if not legally, enjoys the privileges of a political aristocracy. On the other hand, it assumes to be a spontaneous police-board; it prepares and circulates the lists which designate the ill-disposed, suspected, and lukewarm; it lodges information against nobles whose sons have emigrated; against unsworn priests who still reside in their former parishes, and against nuns, "whose conduct is unconstitutional". It prompts, directs, and rebukes local authorities; it is itself a supplemental, superior, and usurping authority. -- All at once, sensible men realize its character, and protest against it.

"A body thus organized," says a petition,²⁹ "exists solely for arming one citizen against another. . . . Discussions take place there, and denunciations are made under the seal of inviolable secrecy. . . . . Honest citizens, surrendered to the most atrocious calumny, are destroyed without an opportunity of defending themselves. It is a veritable Inquisition. It is the center of seditious publications, a school of cabals and intrigue. If the citizens have to blush at the selection of unworthy candidates, they are all due to this class of associations . . . Composed of the excited and the incendiary, of those who aim to rule the State," the club everywhere tends

"to a mastery of the popular opinion, to thwarting the municipalities, to an intrusion of itself between these and the people," to an usurpation of legal forms and to become a "colossus of despotism."

Vain complaints! The National Assembly, ever in alarm on its own account, shields the popular club and accords it its favor or indulgence. A journal of the party had recommended "the people to form themselves into small platoons." These platoons, one by one, are growing. Each borough now has a local oligarchy, an enlisted and governing band. To create an army out of these scattered bands, simply requires a staff and a central rallying-point. The central point and the staff have both for a long time been ready in Paris, it is the association of the "Friends of the Constitution."

Their rallying-points. -- Origin and composition of the Paris Jacobin club. -- It affiliates with provincial clubs. -- Its leaders. -- The fanatics. -- The Intriguers. -- Their object. -- Their means.

No association in France, indeed, dates farther back, and has an equal prestige. It was born before the Revolution, April 30, 1789.³⁰ At the assembly of the States-General in Brittany, the deputies from Quimper, Hennebon, and Pontivy saw how important it was to vote in concert, and they had scarcely reached Versailles when, in common with others, they hired a hall, and, along with Mounier, secretary of the States-General of Dauphiny, and other deputies from the provinces, at once organized a union which was destined to last. Up to the 6th of October, none but deputies were comprised in it; after that date, on removing to Paris, in the library of the Jacobins, a convent in the Rue St. Honoré, many well-known eminent men were admitted, such as Condorcet, and then Laharpe, Chénier, Champfort, David, and Talma, among the most prominent, with other authors and artists, the whole amounting to about a thousand notable personages. -- No assemblage could be more imposing -- two or three hundred deputies are on its benches, while its rules and by-laws seem specially designed to gather a superior body of men. Candidates for admission were proposed by ten members and afterwards voted on by ballot. To be present at one of its meetings required a card of admission. On one occasion, a member of the committee of two, appointed to verify these cards, happens to be the young Duke of Chartres. There is a committee on administration and a president. Discussions took place with parliamentary formalities, and, according to its status, the questions considered there were those under debate in the National Assembly.³¹ In the lower hall, at certain hours, workmen received instruction and the constitution was explained to them. Seen from afar, no society seems worthier of directing public opinion; near by, the case is different. In the departments, however, where distance lends enchantment, and where old customs prevail implanted by centralization, it is accepted as a guide because its seat is at the capital. Its statutes, its regulations, its spirit, are all imitated; it becomes the alma mater of other associations and they its adopted daughters. It publishes, accordingly, a list of all clubs conspicuously in its journal, together with their denunciations; it insists on their demands; henceforth, every Jacobin in the remotest borough feels the support and endorsement, not only of his local, club, but again of the great club whose numerous offshoots reached the entire territory and which extends its all-powerful protection to the least of its adherents. In return for this protection, each associated club obeys the word of command given at Paris, and to and from, from the center to the extremities, a constant correspondence maintains the established harmony. A vast political machine is thus set agoing, a machine with thousands of arms, all working at once under one impulsion, and the lever which the motions is in the hands of a few master spirits in the Rue St. Honoré.

No machine could be more effective; never was one seen so well contrived for manufacturing artificial, violent public opinion, for making this appear to be national, spontaneous sentiment, for conferring the rights of the silent majority on a vociferous minority, for forcing the surrender of the government.

"Our tactics were very simple," says Grégoire³². "It was understood that one of us should take advantage of the first favorable opportunity to propose some measure in the National Assembly that was sure to be applauded by a small minority and cried down by the majority. But that made no difference. The proposer demanded, which was granted, that the measure should be referred to a committee in which its opponents hoped to see it buried. Then the Paris Jacobins took hold of it. A circular was issued, after which an article on the measure was printed in their journal and discussed in three or four hundred clubs that were leagued together. Three weeks after this the Assembly was flooded with petitions from every quarter, demanding a decree of which the first proposal had been rejected, and which is now passed by a great majority because a discussion of it had ripened public opinion."

In other words, the Assembly must go ahead or it will be driven along, in which process the worst expedients are the best. Those who conduct the club, whether fanatics or intriguers, are fully agreed on this point.

At the head of the former class is Duport, once a counselor in the parliament, who, after 1788, knew how to turn riots to account. The first revolutionary consultations were held in his house. He wants to plough deep, and his devices for burying the ploughshare are such that Sieyès, a radical, if there ever was one, dubbed it a "cavernous policy."³³ Duport, on the 28th of July, 1789, is the organizer of the Committee on Searches, by which all favorably disposed informers or spies form in his hands a supervisory police, which fast becomes a police of provocation. He finds recruits in the lower hall of the Jacobin club, where workmen come to be catechized every morning, while his two lieutenants, the brothers Laurette, have only to draw on the same source for a zealous staff in a choice selection of their instruments. "Ten reliable men receive orders there daily;³⁴ each of these in turn gives his orders to ten more, belonging to different battalions in Paris. In this way each battalion and section receives the same insurrectionary orders, the same denunciations of the constituted authorities, of the mayor of Paris, of the president of the department, and of the commander of the National Guard," everything taking place secretly. These are dark deeds: the leaders themselves call it 'the Sabbath' and, along with fanatics they enlist ruffians. "They spread the rumor that, on a certain day, there will be a great commotion with assassinations and pillage, preceded by the payment of money distributed from hand to hand by subaltern officers among those that can be relied on, and that these bands are to assemble, as advertised, within a radius of thirty or forty leagues."³⁵ -- - One day, to provoke a riot, "half a dozen men, who have arranged the thing, form a small group, in which one of them holds forth vehemently; at once a crowd of about sixty others gathers around them. Then the six men move on from place to place," to form fresh groups making their apparent excitement pass for popular irritation. -- Another day, "about forty fanatics, with powerful lungs, and four or five hundred paid men," scatter themselves around the Tuileries, "yelling furiously," and, gathering under the windows of the Assembly, "move resolutions to assassinate." -- "Our ushers," says a deputy to the Assembly, "whom you ordered to suppress this tumult, heard reiterated threats of bringing you the heads of those the crowd wished to proscribe. That very evening, in the Palais-Royal, "I heard a subordinate leader of this factious band boast of having charged your ushers to take this answer back, adding that there was time enough yet for all good citizens to follow his advice." -- The watchword of these agitators is, are you true and the response is, a true man. Their pay is twelve francs a day, and when in action they make engagements on the spot at that rate. "From several depositions taken by officers of the National Guard and at the mayoralty," it is ascertained that twelve francs a day were tendered to "honest people to join in with those you may have heard shouting, and some of them actually had the twelve francs put into their hands." -- The money comes from the coffers of the Duke of Orleans, and they are freely drawn upon; at his death, with a property amounting to 114,000,000 francs, his debts amount to 74,000,000.³⁶ Being one of the faction, he contributes to its expenses, and, being the richest man in the kingdom, he contributes proportionately to his wealth. Not because he is a party leader, for he is too effeminate, too nervous; but "his petty council,"³⁷ and especially one of his private secretaries, Laclos, cherishes great designs for him, their object being to make him lieutenant-general of the kingdom, afterwards regent, and even king,³⁸ so that they may rule in his name and "share the profits." -- - In the mean time they turn his whims to the best account, particularly Laclos, who is a kind of subordinate Macchiavelli, capable of anything, profound, depraved, and long indulging his fondness for monstrous combinations; nobody ever so coolly delighted in indescribable compounds of human wickedness and debauchery. In politics, as in romance, his department is "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Formerly he maneuvered as an amateur with prostitutes and ruffians in the fashionable world; now he maneuvers in earnest with the prostitutes and ruffians of the sidewalks. On the 5th of October 1789, he is seen, "dressed in a brown coat,"³⁹ foremost among the women starting for Versailles, while his hand⁴⁰ is visible "in the Réveillon affair, also in the burning of barriers and Châteaux," and in the widespread panic which aroused all France against imaginary bandits. His operations, says Malouet, "were all paid for by the Duke of Orleans"; he entered into them "for his own account, and the Jacobins for theirs." -- At this time their alliance is plain to everybody. On the 21st of November, 1790, Laclos becomes secretary of the club, chief of the department of correspondence, titular editor of its journal, and the invisible, active, and permanent director of all its enterprises. Whether actual demagogues or prompted by ambition, whether paid agents or earnest revolutionaries, each group works on its own account, both in concert, both in the same direction, and both devoted to the same undertaking, which is the conquest of power by every possible means.

Small number of Jacobins. -- Sources of their power. -- They form a league. -- They have faith. -- Their unscrupulousness. -- The power of the party vested in the group which best fulfills these conditions.

At first sight their success seems doubtful, for they are in a minority, and a very small one. At Besançon, in November, 1791, the revolutionaries of every shade of opinion and degree, whether Girondists or Montagnards, consist of about 500 or 600 out of 3,000 electors, and, in November, 1792, of not more than the same number out of 6,000 and 7,000.⁴¹ At Paris, in November, 1791, there are 6,700 out of more than 81,000 on the rolls; in October, 1792, there are less than 14,000 out of 160,000.⁴² At Troyes, in 1792, there are found only 400 or 500 out of 7,000 electors, and at Strasbourg the same number out of 8,000 electors.⁴³ Accordingly only about one-tenth of the electoral population are revolutionaries, and if we leave out the Girondists and the semi-conservatives, the number is reduced by one- half. Towards the end of 1792, at Besançon, scarcely more than 300 pure Jacobins are found in a population of from 25,000 to 30,000, while at Paris, out of 700,000 inhabitants only 5,000 are Jacobins. It is certain that in the capital, where the most excitement prevails, and where more of them are found than elsewhere, never, even in a crisis and when vagabonds are paid and bandits recruited, are there more than 10,000.⁴⁴ In a large town like Toulouse a representative of the people on missionary service wins over only about 400 persons.⁴⁵ Counting fifty or so in each small town, twenty in each large borough, and five or six in each village, we find, on an average, but one Jacobin to fifteen electors and National Guards, while, taking the whole of France, all the Jacobins put together do not amount to 300,000.⁴⁶ -- This is a small number for the enslavement of six millions of able-bodied men, and for installing in a country of twenty-six millions inhabitants a more absolute despotism than that of an Asiatic sovereign. Force, however, is not measured by numbers; they form a band in the midst of a crowd and, in this disorganized, inert crowd, a band that is determined to push its way like an iron wedge splitting a log.

And against sedition from within as well as conquest from without a nation may only defend itself through the activities of its government, which provides the indispensable instruments of common action. Let it fail or falter and the great majority, undecided about what to do, lukewarm and busy elsewhere, ceases to be a corps and disintegrates into dust. Of the two governments around which the nation might have rallied, the first one, after July 14, 1789, lies prostrate on the ground where it slowly crumbles away. Now its ghost, which returns, is still more odious because it brings with it the same senseless abuses and intolerable burdens, and, in addition to these, a yelping pack of claimants and recriminators. After 1790 it appears on the frontier more arbitrary than ever at the head of a coming invasion of angry émigrés and grasping foreigners. -- The other government, that just constructed by the Constituent Assembly, is so badly put together that the majority cannot use it. It is not adapted to its hand; no political instrument at once so ponderous and so helpless was ever seen. An enormous effort is needed to set it in motion; every citizen is obliged to give it about two days labor per week.⁴⁷ Thus laboriously started but half in motion, it poorly meets the various tasks imposed upon it -- the collection of taxes, public order in the streets, the circulation of supplies, and security for consciences, lives and property. Toppled over by its own action, another rises out of it, illegal and serviceable, which takes its place and stands. -- In a great centralized state whoever possesses the head possesses the body. By virtue of being led, the French have contracted the habit of letting themselves be led.⁴⁸ People in the provinces involuntarily turn their eyes to the capital, and, on a crisis occurring, run out to stop the mailman to know what government happens to have fallen, the majority accepts or submits to it. -- Because, in the first place, most of the isolated groups which would like to overthrow it dare not engage in the struggle: it seems too strong; through inveterate routine they imagine behind it that great, distant France which, under its impulsion, will crush them with its mass.⁴⁹ In the second place, should a few isolated groups undertake to overthrow it, they are not in a condition to keep up the struggle: it is too strong. They are, indeed, not yet organized while it is fully so, owing to the docile set of officials inherited from the government overthrown. Under monarchy or republic the government clerk comes to his office regularly every morning to dispatch the orders transmitted to him.⁵⁰ Under monarchy or republic the policeman daily makes his round to arrest those against who he has a warrant. So long as instructions come from above in the hierarchical order of things, they are obeyed. From one end of the territory to the other, therefore, the machine, with its hundred thousand arms, works efficiently in the hands of those who have seized the lever at the central point. Resolution, audacity, rude energy, are all that are needed to make the lever act, and none of these are wanting in the Jacobin. ⁵¹

First, he has faith, and faith at all times "moves mountains.⁵² "Take any ordinary party recruit, an attorney, a second-rate lawyer, a shopkeeper, an artisan, and conceive, if you can, the extraordinary effect of this doctrine on a mind so poorly prepared for it, so narrow, so out of proportion with the gigantic conception which has mastered it. Formed for the routine and the limited views of one in his position, he is suddenly carried away by a complete system of philosophy, a theory of nature and of man, a theory of society and of religion, a theory of universal history,⁵³ conclusions about the past, the present, and the future of humanity, axioms of absolute right, a system of perfect and final truth, the whole concentrated in a few rigid formulae as, for example:

"Religion is superstition, monarchy is usurpation, priests are impostors, aristocrats are vampires, and kings are so many tyrants and monsters."

These ideas flood a mind of his stamp like a vast torrent precipitating itself into a narrow gorge; they upset it, and, no longer under self-direction, they sweep it away. The man is beside himself. A plain bourgeois, a common laborer is not transformed with impunity into an apostle or liberator of the human species. -- For, it is not his country that he would save, but the entire race. Roland, just before the 10th of August, exclaims "with tears in his eyes, should liberty die in France, she is lost the rest of the world forever! The hopes of philosophers will perish! The whole earth will succumb to the cruelest tyranny!"⁵⁴ -- Grégoire, on the meeting of the Convention, obtained a decree abolishing royalty, and seemed overcome with the thought of the immense benefit he had conferred on the human race.

"I must confess," said he, "that for days I could neither eat nor sleep for excess of joy!"

One day a Jacobin in the tribune declared: "We shall be a nation of gods!" -- Fancies like these bring on lunacy, or, at all events, they create disease. "Some men are in a fever all day long," said a companion of St. Just; "I had it for twelve years . . ."⁵⁵ Later on, "when advanced in life and trying to analyze their experiences, they cannot comprehend it."⁵⁶ Another tells that, in his case, on a "crisis occurring, there was only a hair's breadth between reason and madness." -- "When St. Just and myself," says Baudot, "discharged the batteries at Wissenbourg, we were most liberally thanked for it. Well, there was no merit in that; we knew perfectly well that the shot could not do us any harm." -- Man, in this exalted state, is unconscious of obstacles, and, according to circumstances, rise above or falls below himself, freely spilling his own blood as well as the blood of others, heroic as a soldier and atrocious as a civilian; he is not to be resisted in either direction for his strength increases a hundredfold through his fury, and, on his tearing wildly through the streets, people get out of his way as on the approach of a mad bull.

If they do not jump aside of their own accord, he will run at them, for he is unscrupulous as well as furious. -- In every political struggle certain kinds of actions are prohibited; at all events, if the majority is sensible and wishes to act fairly, it repudiates them for itself. It will not violate any particular law, for, if one law is broken, this tends to the breaking of others. It is opposed to overthrowing an established government because every interregnum is a return to barbarism. It is opposed to the element of popular insurrection because, in such a resort, public power is surrendered to the irrationality of brutal passion. It is opposed to a conversion of the government into a machine for confiscation and murder because it deems the natural function of government to be the protection of life and property. -- The majority, accordingly, in confronting the Jacobin, who allows himself all this,⁵⁷ is like a unarmed man facing one who is fully armed.⁵⁸ The Jacobin, on principle, holds the law in contempt, for the only law, which he accepts is arbitrary mob rule. He has no hesitation in proceeding against the government because, in his eyes, the government is a clerk which the people always has the right to remove. He welcomes insurrection because, through it, the people recover their sovereignty with no limitations. -- Moreover, as with casuists, "the end justifies the means."⁵⁹ "Let the colonies perish," exclaims a Jacobin in the Constituent Assembly, "rather than sacrifice a principle." "Should the day come," says St. Just, "when I become convinced that it is impossible to endow the French with mild, vigorous, and rational ways, inflexible against tyranny and injustice, that day I will stab myself." Meanwhile he guillotines the others. "We will make France a graveyard," exclaimed Carrier, "rather than not regenerating it our own way!"⁶⁰ They are ready to risk the ship in order to seize the helm. From the first, they organize street riots and jacqueries in the rural districts, they let loose on society prostitutes and ruffians, vile and savage beasts. Throughout the struggle they take advantage of the coarsest and most destructive passions, of the blindness, credulity, and rage of an infatuated crowd, of dearth, of fear of bandits, of rumors of conspiracy, and of threats of invasion. At last, having seized power through a general upheaval, they hold on to it through terror and executions. -- Straining will to the utmost, with no curb to check it, steadfastly believing in its own right and with utter contempt for the rights of others, with fanatical energy and the expedients of scoundrels, a minority may, in employing such forces, easily master and subdue a majority. So true is that, with faction itself, that victory is always on the side of the group with the strongest faith and the least scruples. Four times between 1789 and 1794, political gamblers take their seats at a table where the stake is supreme power, and four times in succession the "Impartiaux," the "Feuillants," the "Girondins," and the "Dantonists," form the majority and lose the game. Four times in succession the majority has no desire to break customary rules, or, at the very least, to infringe on any rule universally accepted, to wholly disregard the teachings of experience, the letter of the law, the precepts of humanity, or the suggestions of pity. -- The minority, on the contrary, is determined beforehand to win at any price; its views and opinion are correct, and if rules are opposed to that, so much the worse for the rules. At the decisive moment, it claps a pistol to its adversary's head, overturns the table, and collects the stakes.

The Jacobins Come Into In Power. -- The Elections Of 1791. -- Proportion Of Places Gained By Them.

In June, 1791, and during the five following months, the class of active citizens¹ are convoked to elect their representatives, which, as we know, according to the law, are of every kind and degree. In the first place, there are 40,000 members of electoral colleges of the second degree and 745 deputies. Next, there are one-half of the administrators of 83 departments, one-half of the administrators of 544 districts, one-half of the administrators of 41,000 communes, and finally, in each municipality, the mayor and syndic-attorney. Then in each department they have to elect the president of the criminal court and the prosecuting-attorney, and, throughout France, officers of the National Guard; in short, almost the entire body of the agents and depositories of legal authority. The garrison of the public citadel is to be renewed, which is the second and even the third time since 1789. -- At each time the Jacobins have crept into the place, in small bands, but this time they enter in large bodies. Pétion becomes mayor of Paris, Manual, syndic-attorney, and Danton the deputy of Manuel. Robespierre is elected prosecuting-attorney in criminal cases. The very first week,² 136 new deputies enter their names on the club's register. In the Assembly the party numbers about 250 members. On passing all the posts of the fortress in review, we may estimate the besiegers as occupying one-third of them, and perhaps more. Their siege for two years has been carried on with unerring instinct, the extraordinary spectacle presenting itself of an entire nation legally overcome by a troop of insurgents.³

Their siege operations. -- Means used by them to discourage the majority of electors and conservative candidates. -- Frequency of elections. -- Obligation to take the oath.

First of all, they clear the ground, and through the decrees forced out of the Constituent Assembly, they keep most of the majority away from the polls. -- On the one hand, under the pretext of better ensuring popular sovereignty, the elections are so multiplied, and held so near together, as to demand of each active citizen one-sixth of his time; such an exaction is very great for hard-working people who have a trade or any occupation,⁴ which is the case with the great mass; at all events, with the useful and sane portion of the population. Accordingly, as we have seen, it stays away from the polls, leaving the field open to idlers or fanatics.⁵ -- On the other hand, by virtue of the constitution, the civic oath, which includes the ecclesiastical oath, is imposed on all electors, for, if any one takes the former and reserves the latter, his vote is thrown out: in November, in the Doubs, the municipal elections of thirty- three communes are invalidated solely on this pretext.⁶ Not only forty thousand ecclesiastics are thus rendered unsworn (insermentés), but again, all scrupulous Catholics lose the right of suffrage, these being by far the most numerous in Artois, Doubs and the Jura, in the Lower and Upper Rhine district,⁷ in the two Sévres and la Vendée, in the Lower Loire, Morbihan, Finisterre and Côtes du Nord, in Lozère and Ardèche, without mentioning the southern departments.⁸ Thus, aided by the law which they have rendered impracticable, the Jacobins, on the one hand, are rid of all sensible voters in advance, counting by millions; and, on the other, aided by a law which they have rendered intolerant, they are rid of the Catholic vote which counts by hundreds of thousands. On entering the electoral lists, consequently, thanks to this double exclusion, they find themselves confronted by only the smallest number of electors.

Annoyances and dangers of public elections. -- The constituents excluded from the Legislative body.

Operations must now be commenced against these, and a first expedient consists in depriving them of their candidates. The obligation of taking the oath has already partly provided for this, in Lozère all the officials send in their resignations rather than take the oath;⁹ here are men who will not be candidates at the coming elections, for nobody covets a place which he was forced to abandon; in general, the suppression of all party candidatures is effected in no other way than by making the post of a magistrate distasteful. -- The Jacobins have successfully adhered to this principle by promoting and taking the lead in innumerable riots against the King, the officials and the clerks, against nobles, ecclesiastics, corn-dealers and land-owners, against every species of public authority whatever its origin. Everywhere the authorities are constrained to tolerate or excuse murders, pillage and arson, or, at the very least, insurrections and disobedience. For two years a mayor runs the risk of being hung on proclaiming martial law; a captain is not sure of his men on marching to protect a tax levy; a judge on the bench is threatened if he condemns the marauders who devastate the national forests. The magistrate, whose duty it is to see that the law is respected, is constantly obliged to strain the law, or allow it to be strained; if refractory, a summary blow dealt by the local Jacobins forces his legal authority to yield to their illegal dictate, so that he has to resign himself to being either their accomplice or their puppet. Such a rôle is intolerable to a man of feeling or conscience. Hence, in 1790 and 1791, nearly all the prominent and reputable men who, in 1789, had seats in the Hôtels-de-villes, or held command in the National Guard, all country-gentlemen, chevaliers of St. Louis, old parliamentarians, the upper bourgeoisie and large landed-proprietors, retire into private life and renounce public functions which are no longer tenable. Instead of offering themselves to public suffrage they avoid it, and the party of order, far from electing the magistracy, no longer even finds candidates for it.

Through an excess of precaution, its natural leaders have been legally disqualified, the principal offices, especially those of deputy and minister, being interdicted beforehand to the influential men in whom we find the little common sense gained by the French people during the past two years.-In the month of June, 1779, even after the irreconcilables had parted company with the "Right," there still remained in the Assembly about 700 members who, adhering to the constitution but determined to repress disorder, would have formed a sensible legislature had they been re-elected. All of these, except a very small group of revolutionaries, had learned something by experience, and, in the last days of their session, two serious events, the king's flight and the riot in the Champ de Mars, had made them acquainted with the defects of their machinery. With this executive instrument in their hands for three months, they see that it is racked, that things are tottering, and that they themselves are being run over by fanatics and the crowd. They accordingly attempt to put on a drag, and several even think of retracing their steps.¹⁰ They cut loose from the Jacobins; of the three or four hundred deputies on the club list in the Rue St. Honoré¹¹ but seven remain; the rest form at the Feuillants a distinct opposition club, and at their head are the first founders, Duport, the two Lameths, Barnave, the authors of the constitution, all the fathers of the new régime.¹² In the last decree of the Constituent Assembly they loudly condemn the usurpations of popular associations, and not only interdict to these all meddling in administrative or political matters, but likewise any collective petition or deputation.¹³ -- Here may the friends of order find candidates whose chances are good, for, during two years and more, each in his own district is the most conspicuous, the best accredited, and the most influential man there; he stands well with his electors on account of the popularity of the constitution he has made, and it is very probable that his name would rally to it a majority of votes.-The Jacobins, however, have foreseen this danger: Four months earlier,¹⁴ with the aid of the Court, which never missed an opportunity to ruin itself and everything else,¹⁵ they made the most of the grudges of the conservatives and the wearyness of the Assembly. Tired and disgusted, in a fit of mistaken selflessness, the Assembly, through enthusiasm and taken by surprise, passes an act declaring all its members ineligible for election to the next Assembly dismissing in advance the leaders of the gentlemen's party.

The friends of order deprived of the right of free assemblage. -- Violent treatment of their clubs in Paris and the provinces. -- Legal prevention of conservative associations.

If the latter (the honest men of the Right), in spite of so many drawbacks, attempt a struggle, they are arrested at the very first step. For, to enter upon an electoral campaign, requires preliminary meetings for conference and to understand each other, while the faculty of forming an association, which the law grants them as a right, is actually withheld from them by their adversaries. As a beginning, the Jacobins hooted at and "stone" the members of the "Right"¹⁶ holding their meetings in the Salon français of the Rue Royale, and, according to the prevailing rule, the police tribunal, "considering that this assemblage is a cause of disturbance, that it produces gatherings in the street, that only violent means can be employed to protect it," orders its dissolution.¹⁷ -- Towards the month of August, 1790, a second club is organized, and, this time, composed of the wisest and most liberal men. Malouet and Count Clermont-Tonnerre are at the head of it. It takes the name of "Friends of a Monarchical Constitution," and is desirous of restoring public order by maintaining the reforms which have been reached. All formalities on its part have been complied with. There are already about 800 members in Paris. Subscriptions flow into its treasury. The provinces send in numerous adhesions, and, what is worse than all, bread is distributed by them at a reduced price, by which the people, probably, will be conciliated. Here is a center of opinion and influence, analogous to that of the Jacobin club, which the Jacobins cannot tolerate.¹⁸ M. de Clermont-Tonnerre having leased the summer Vauxhall, a captain in the National Guard notifies the proprietor of it that if he rents it, the patriots of the Palais-Royal will march to it in a body, and close it; fearing that the building will be damaged, he cancels the lease, while the municipality, which fears skirmishes, orders a suspension of the meetings. The club makes a complaint and follows it up, while the letter of the law is so plain that an official authorization of the club is finally granted. Thereupon the Jacobin newspapers and stump- speakers let loose their fury against a future rival that threatens to dispute their empire. On the 23rd of January, 1791, Barnave, in the National Assembly, employing metaphorical language apt to be used as a death-shout, accuses the members of the new club "of giving the people bread that carries poison with it." Four days after this, M. Clermont-Tonnerre's dwelling is assailed by an armed throng. Malouet, on leaving it, is almost dragged from his carriage, and the crowd around him cry out, "There goes the bastard who denounced the people! "- At length, its founders, who, out of consideration for the municipality, have waited two months, hire another hall in the Rue des Petites-Ecuries, and on the 28th of March begin their sessions. "On reaching it," writes one of them, "we found a mob composed of drunkards, screaming boys, ragged women, soldiers exciting them on, and especially those frightful hounds, armed with stout, knotty cudgels, two feet long, which are excellent skull-crackers."¹⁹ The thing was made up beforehand. At first there were only three or four hundred of them, and, ten minutes after, five or six hundred; in a quarter of an hour, there are perhaps four thousand flocking in from all sides; in short, the usual make-up of an insurrection. "The people of the quarter certified that they did not recognize one of the faces." Jokes, insults, cuffs, clubbings, and saber-cuts, -- the members of the club "who agreed to come unarmed" being dispersed, while several are knocked down, dragged by the hair, and a dozen or fifteen more are wounded. To justify the attack, white cockades are shown, which, it is pretended, were found in their pockets. Mayor Bailly arrives only when it is all over, and, as a measure of "public order," the municipal authorities have the club of Constitutional Monarchists closed for good.

Owing to these outrages by the faction, with the connivance of the authorities, other similar clubs are suppressed in the same way. There are a good many of them, and in the principal towns -- "Friends of Peace," "Friends of the Country," "Friends of the King, of Peace, and of Religion," "Defenders of Religion, Persons, and Property". Magistrates and officers, the most cultivated and polished people, are generally members; in short, the élite of the place. Formerly, meetings took place for conversation and debate, and, being long- established, the club naturally passes over from literature to politics. -- The watch-word against all these provincial clubs is given from the Rue St. Honoré.²⁰ "They are centers of conspiracy, and must be looked after" forthwith, and be at once trodden out. -- At one time, as at Cahors,²¹ a squad of the National Guard, on its return from an expedition against the neighboring gentry, and to finish its task breaks in on the club, "throws its furniture out of the windows and demolishes the house." -- At another time, as at Perpignan, the excited mob surrounds the club, dancing a fandango, and yell out, to the lantern! The club-house is sacked, while eighty of its members, covered with bruises, are shut up in the citadel for their safety.²² -- At another time, as at Aix, the Jacobin club insults its adversaries on their own premises and provokes a scuffle, whereupon the municipality causes the doors of the assailed club to be walled up and issues warrants of arrest against its members. -- Always punishment awaits them for whatever violence they have to submit to. Their mere existence seems an offense. At Grenoble, they scarcely assemble before they are dispersed. The fact is, they are suspected of "incivism;" their intentions may not be right; in any event, they cause a division of the place into two camps, and that is enough. In the department of Gard, their clubs are all broken up, by order of the department, because "they are centers of malevolence." At Bordeaux, the municipality, considering that "alarming reports are current of priests and privileged persons returning to town," prohibits all reunions, except that of the Jacobin club. -- Thus, "under a system of liberty of the most exalted kind, in the presence of the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man which legitimates whatever is not unlawful," and which postulates equality as the principle of the French constitution, whoever is not a Jacobin is excluded from common rights. An intolerant club sets itself up as a holy church, and proscribes others which have not received from it "orthodox baptism, civic inspiration, and the aptitude of languages." To her alone belongs the right of assemblage, and the right of making proselytes. Conservative, thoughtful men in all towns throughout the kingdom are forbidden to form electoral committees, to possess a tribune, a fund, subscribers and adherents, to cast the weight of their names and common strength into the scale of public opinion, to gather around their permanent nucleus the scattered multitude of sensible people, who would like to escape from the Revolution without falling back into the ancient régime. Let them whisper amongst themselves in corners, and they may still be tolerated, but woe to them if they would leave their lonely retreat to act in concert, to canvass voters, and support a candidate. Up to the day of voting they must remain in the presence of their combined, active, and obstreperous adversaries, scattered, inert, and mute.

Turmoil of the elections of 1790. -- Elections in 1791. -- Effect of the King's flight. -- Domiciliary visits. -- Montagne during the electoral period.

Will they at least be able to vote freely on that day? They are not sure of it, and, judging by occurrences during the past year, it is doubtful. -- In April, 1790, at Bois d'Aisy, in Burgundy, M. de Bois d'Aisy, a deputy, who had returned from Paris to deposit his vote,²³ was publicly menaced. He was informed that nobles and priests must take no part m the elections, while many were heard to say, in his hearing, that in order to prevent this it would be better to hang him. Not far off; at Ste. Colombe, M. de Viteaux was driven out of the electoral assembly, and then put to death after three hours of torture. The same thing occurred at Semur; two gentlemen were knocked down with clubs and stones, another saved himself with difficulty, and a curé died after being stabbed six times. -- A warning for priests and for gentlemen: they had better not vote, and the same good advice may be given to dealers in grain, to land-owners, and every other suspected person. For this is the day on which the people recover their sovereignty; the violent believe that they have the right to do exactly what suits them, nothing being more natural than to exclude candidates in advance who are distrusted, or electors who do not vote as they ought to. -- At Villeneuve-St.-Georges, near Paris,²⁴ a barrister, a man of austere and energetic character, is about to be elected judge by the district electors; the proletariat, however, mistrust a judge likely to condemn marauders, and forty or fifty vagabonds collect together under the windows and cry out: "We don't want him elected." The curé of Crosne, president of the electoral assembly, informs them in vain that the assembled electors represent 90 communes, nearly 100,000 inhabitants, and that "40 persons should not prevail against 100,000. Shouts redouble and the electors renounce their candidate.- At Pau, patriots among the militia²⁵ forcibly release one of their imprisoned leaders, circulate a list for proscriptions, attack a poll-teller with their fists and afterwards with sabers, until the proscribed hide themselves away; on the following day "nobody is disposed to attend the electoral assembly." -- - Things are much worse in 1791. In the month of June, just at the time of the opening of the primary meetings, the king has fled to Varennes, the Revolution seems compromised, civil war and a foreign war loom up on the horizon like two ghosts; the National Guard had everywhere taken up arms, and the Jacobins were making the most of the universal panic for their own advantage. To dispute their votes is no longer the question; it is not well to be visible: among so many turbulent gatherings a popular execution is soon over. The best thing now for royalists, constitutionalists, conservatives and moderates of every kind, for the friends of law and of order, is to stay at home -- too happy if they may be allowed to remain there, to which the armed rabble agrees; on the condition of frequently paying them visits.

Consider their situation during the whole of the electoral period, in a calm district, and judge of the rest of France by this corner of it. At Mortagne,²⁶ a small town of 6,000 souls, the laudable spirit of 1789 still existed up to the journey to Varennes. Among the forty or fifty noble families were a good many liberals. Here, as elsewhere among the gentry, the clergy and the middle class, the philosophic education of the eighteenth century had revived the old provincial spirit of initiative, and the entire upper class had zealously and gratuitously undertaken the public duties which it alone could perform well. District presidents, mayors, and municipal officers, were all chosen from among ecclesiastics and the nobles; the three principal officers of the National Guard were chevaliers of St. Louis, while other grades were filled by the leading people of the community. Thus had the free elections placed authority in the hands of the socially superior, the new order of things resting on the legitimate hierarchy of conditions, educations, and capacities. -- But for six months the club, formed out of "a dozen hot-headed, turbulent fellows, under the presidency and in the hands of a certain Rattier, formerly a cook," worked upon the population and the rural districts. Immediately on the receipt of the news of the King's flight, the Jacobins "give out that nobles and priests had supplied him with money for his departure, to bring about a counter-revolution." One family had given such an amount, and another so much; there was no doubt about it; the precise figures are given, and given for each family according to its known resources. -- Forthwith, "the principal clubbists, associated with the dubious part of the National Guard," spread through the streets in squads: the houses of the nobles and of other suspected persons are invaded. All the arms, "guns, pistols, swords, hunting-knives, and sword-canes," are carried off. Every hole and corner is ransacked; they make the inmates open, or they force open, secretaries and clothes-presses in search of ammunition, the search extending "even to the ladies' toilette-tables". By way of precaution "they break sticks of pomatum in two, presuming that musket-balls are concealed in them, and they take away hair-powder under the pretext that it is either colored or masked gunpowder." Then, without disbanding, the troop betakes itself to the environs and into the country, where it operates with the same promptness in the chateaux, so that "in one day all honest citizens, those with the most property and furniture to protect, are left without arms at the mercy of the first robber that comes along." All reputed aristocrats are disarmed. As such are considered those who "disapprove of the enthusiasm of the day, or who do not attend the club, or who harbor any unsworn ecclesiastic," and, first of all, "the officers of the National Guard who are nobles, beginning with the commander and his entire staff." -- The latter allow their swords to be taken without resistance, and with a forbearance and patriotic spirit of which their brethren everywhere furnish an example "they are obliging enough to remain at their posts so as not to disorganize the army, hoping that this frenzy will soon come to an end," contenting themselves with making their complaint to the department. -- But in vain the department orders their arms to be restored to them. The clubbists refuse to give them up so long as the king refuses to accept the Constitution; meanwhile they do not hesitate to say that "at the very first gun on the frontier, they will cut the throats of all the nobles and unsworn priests." -- After the royal oath to the Constitution is taken, the department again insists, but no attention is paid to it. On the contrary, the National Guard, dragging cannons along with them, purposely station themselves before the mansions of the unarmed gentry; the ladies of their families are followed in the streets by urchins who sing ÇA IRA²⁷ in their faces, and, in the final refrain, they mention them by name and promise them the lantern; "not one of them could invite a dozen of his friends to supper without incurring the risk of an uproar." -- On the strength of this, the old chiefs of the National Guard resign, and the Jacobins turn the opportunity to account. In contempt of the law the whole body of officers is renewed, and, as peaceable folks dare not deposit their votes, the new staff "is composed of maniacs, taken for the most part, from the lowest class." With this purged militia the club expels nuns, drives off unsworn priests, organizes expeditions in the neighborhood, and goes so far as to purify suspected municipalities.²⁸ -- So many acts of violence committed in town and country, render town and country uninhabitable, and for the élite of the propriety owners, or for well-bred persons, there is no longer any asylum but Paris. After the first disarmament seven or eight families take refuge there, and a dozen or fifteen more join them after a threat of having their throats cut; after the religious persecution, unsworn ecclesiastics, the rest of the nobles, and countless other townspeople, "even with little means," betake themselves there in a mass. There, at least, one is lost in the crowd; one is protected by an incognito against the outrages of the commonalty; one can live there as a private individual. In the provinces even civil rights do not exist; how could any one there exercise political rights? "All honest citizens are kept away from the primary meetings by threats or maltreatment . . . The electoral battlefield is left for those who pay forty-five sous of taxes, more than one-half of them being registered on the poor list." -- Thus the elections are decided beforehand! The former cook is the one who authorizes or creates candidatures, and on the election of the department deputies at the county town, the electors elected are, like himself, true Jacobins.²⁹

Intimidation and withdrawal of the Conservatives. -- Popular outbreaks in Burgundy, Lyonnais, Provence, and the large cities. -- Electoral proceedings of the Jacobins; examples at Aix, Dax, and Montpellier. -- Agitators go unpunishes -- Denunciations by name. -- Manoeuvres with the peasantry. -- General tactics of the Jacobins.

Such is the pressure under which voting takes place in France during the summer and fall of 1791. Domiciliary visits³⁰ and disarmament everywhere force nobles and ecclesiastics, landed proprietors and people of culture, to abandon their homes, to seek refuge in the large towns and to emigrate,³¹ or, at least, confine themselves strictly to private life, to abstain from all propaganda, from every candidature, and from all voting. It would be madness to be seen in so many cantons where searches end in a riot; in Burgundy and the Lyonnais, where castles are sacked, where aged gentlemen are mauled and left for dead, where M. de Guillin has just been assassinated and cut to pieces; at Marseilles, where conservative party leaders are imprisoned, where a regiment of Swiss guards under arms scarcely suffices to enforce the verdict of the court which sets them at liberty, where, if any indiscreet person opposes Jacobin resolutions his mouth is closed by being notified that he will be buried alive; at Toulon, where the Jacobins shoot down all conservatives and the regular troops, where M. de Beaucaire, captain in the navy, is killed by a shot in the back, where the club, supported by the needy, by sailors, by navvies, and "vagabond peddlers," maintains a dictatorship by right of conquest; at Brest, at Tulle, at Cahors, where at this very moment gentlemen and officers are massacred in the street. It is not surprising that honest people turn away from the ballot-box as from a center of cut-throats. -- Nevertheless, let them come if they like; it will be easy to get rid of them. At Aix, the assessor whose duty it is to read the electors' names is informed that "the names should be called out by an unsullied mouth, that, being an aristocrat and fanatical, he could neither speak nor vote," and, without further ceremony, they put him out of the room.³² The process is an admirable one for converting a minority into a majority and yet here is another, still more effective. -- At Dax, the Feuillants, taking the title of "Friends of the French Constitution," have split up with the Jacobins,³³ and, moreover, they insist on excluding from the National Guard "foreigners without property or position," the passive citizens who are admitted into it in spite of the law, who usurp the right of voting and who "daily affront tranquil inhabitants." Consequently, on election day, in the church where the primary meeting is held, two of the Feuillants, Laurède, formerly collector of the vingtièmes,, and Brunache, a glazier, propose to exclude an intruder, a servant on wages. The Jacobins at once rush forward. Laurède is pressed back on the holy-water basin and wounded on the head; on trying to escape he is seized by the hair, thrown down, pierced in the arm with a bayonet, put in prison, and Brunache along with him. Eight days afterwards, at the second meeting none are present but Jacobins; naturally, "they are all elected". They form the new municipality, which, notwithstanding the orders of the department, not only refuses to liberate the two prisoners, but throws them into a dungeon. -- At Montpellier, the delay in the operation is greater, but it is only the more complete. The votes are deposited, the ballot-boxes closed and sealed up and the conservatives obtain a majority. Thereupon the Jacobin club, with the Society of the "iron-clubs," calling itself the Executive power, betake themselves in force to the sectional meetings, burn one of the ballots, use firearms and kill two men. To restore order the municipality stations each company of the National Guard at its captain's door, The moderates among them naturally obey orders, but the violent party do not. They overrun the town, numbering about 2,000 inhabitants, enter the houses, kill three men in the street or in their domiciles, and force the administrative body to suspend its electoral assemblies. In addition to this they require the disarmament "of the aristocrats," and this not being done soon enough, they kill an artisan who is walking in the street with his mother, cut off his head, bear it aloft in triumph, and suspend it in front of his dwelling. The authorities are now convinced and accordingly decree a disarmament, and the victors parade the streets in a body. In exuberance or as a precaution, they fire, as they pass along, at the windows of suspected houses and happen to kill an additional man and woman. During the three following days six hundred families emigrate, while the authorities report that everything is going on well, and that order is restored. "The elections," they say, "are now proceeding in the quietest manner since the ill-intentioned voluntarily keeping away from them, a large number having left the town. "³⁴ A void is created around the ballot-box and this is called the unanimity of voters. -- The effect of such assassinations is great and only a few are required; especially when they go unpunished, which is always the case. Henceforth all that the Jacobins have to do is to threaten; people no longer resist them for they know that it costs too much to face them down. They do not care to attend electoral meetings where they meet insult and danger; they acknowledge defeat at the start. Have not the Jacobins irresistible arguments, without taking blows into account? At Paris,³⁵ Marat in three successive numbers of his paper has just denounced by name "the rascals and thieves" who canvass for electoral nominations, not the nobles and priests but ordinary citizens, lawyers, architects, physicians, jewellers, stationers, printers, upholsterers and other artisans, each name being given in full with the professions, addresses and one of the following qualifications, "hypocrite (tartufe), immoral, dishonest, bankrupt, informer, usurer, cheat," not to mention others that I cannot write down. It must be noted that this slanderous list may become a proscriptive list, and that in every town and village in France similar lists are constantly drawn up and circulated by the local dub, which enables us to judge whether the struggle between it and its adversaries is a fair one.-As to rural electors, it has suitable means for persuading them, especially in the innumerable cantons ravaged or threatened by the jacqueries, (country- riots) or, for example, in Corrèze, where "the whole department is smattered with insurrections and devastation's, and where nobody talks of anything but of hanging the officers who serve papers."³⁶ Through-out the electoral operations the sittings of the dub are permanent; "its electors are incessantly summoned to its meetings; " at each of these "the main question is the destruction of fish-ponds and rentals, their principal speakers summing it all up by saying that none ought to be paid." The majority of electors, composed of rustics, are found to be sensitive to speeches like this; all its candidates are obliged to express themselves against fishponds and rentals; its deputies and the public prosecuting attorney are nominated on this profession of faith; in other words, to be elected, the Jacobins promise to greedy tenants the incomes and property of their owners. -- We already see in the proceedings by which they secure one-third of the offices in 1791 the germ of the methods by which they will secure the whole of them in 1792; in this first electoral campaign their acts indicate not merely their maxims and policy but, again, the condition, education, spirit and character of the men whom they place in power locally as well as at the capital.

Composition of the Legislative Assembly. -- Social rank of the Deputies. Their inexperience, incompetence, and prejudices.

If it be true that a nation should be represented by its superior men, France was strangely represented during the Revolution. From one Assembly to another we see the level steadily declining; especially is the fall very great from the Constituent to the Legislative Assembly. The actors entitled to perform withdraw just as they begin to understand their parts; and yet more, they have excluded themselves from the theatre, while the stage is surrendered to their substitutes.

"The preceding Assembly," writes an ambassador,¹ "contained men of great talent, large fortune, and honorable name, a combination which had an imposing effect on the people, although violently opposed to personal distinctions. The actual Assembly is but little more than a council of lawyers, got together from every town and village in France."

In actual fact, out of 745 deputies, indeed, "400 lawyers belong, for the most part, to the dregs of the profession"; there are about twenty constitutional priests, "as many poets and literary men of but little reputation, almost all without any fortune," the greater number being less than thirty years old, sixty being less than twenty-six,² nearly all of them trained in the clubs and the popular assemblies". There is not one noble or prelate belonging to the ancient régime, no great landed proprietor,³ no head of a service, no eminent specialist in diplomacy, in finance, in the administrative or military arts. But three general officers are found there, and these are of the lower rank,⁴ one of them having held his appointment but three months, and the other two being wholly unknown. -- At the head of the diplomatic committee stands Brissot, itinerant journalist, lately traveling about in England and the United States. He is supposed to be competent in the affairs of both worlds; in reality he is one of those presuming, threadbare, talkative fellows, who, living in a garret, lecture foreign cabinets and reconstruct all Europe. Things, to them, seem to be as easily worked out as words and sentences: one day,⁵ to entice the English into an alliance with France, Brissot proposes to place two towns, Dunkirk and Calais, in their hands as security; another day, he proposes "to make a descent on Spain, and, at the same time, to send a fleet to conquer Mexico." -- The leading member on the committee on finances is Cambon, a merchant from Montpellier, a good accountant, who, at a later period, is to simplify accounting and regulate the Grand Livre of the public debt, which means public bankruptcy. Mean-while, he hastens this on with all his might by encouraging the Assembly to undertake the ruinous and terrible war that is to last for twenty-three years; according to him, "there is more money than is needed for it."⁶ In actual fact, the guarantee of assignats is used up and the taxes do not come in. They live only on the paper money they issue. The assignats lose forty per centum, and the ascertained deficit for 1792 is four hundred millions.⁷ But this revolutionary financier relies upon the confiscations which he instigates in France, and which are to be set agoing in Belgium; here lies all his invention, a systematic robbery on a grand scale within and without the kingdom.

As to the legislators and manufacturers of constitutions, we have Condorcet, a cold-blooded fanatic and systematic leveler, satisfied that a mathematical method suits the social sciences fed on abstractions, blinded by formuloe, and the most chimerical of perverted intellects. Never was a man versed in books more ignorant of mankind; never did a lover of scientific precision better succeed in changing the character of facts. It was he who, two days before the 20th of June, amidst the most brutal public excitement, admired "the calmness" and rationality of the multitude; "considering the way people interpret events, it might be supposed that they had given some hours of each day to the study of analysis." It is he who, two days after the 20th of June, extolled the red cap in which the head of Louis XVI. had been muffled. "That crown is as good as any other. Marcus Aurelius would not have despised it."⁸ -- Such is the discernment and practical judgment of the leaders; from these one can form an opinion of the flock. It consists of novices arriving from the provinces and bringing with them the principles and prejudices of the newspaper. So remote from the center, having no knowledge of general affairs or of their unity, they are two years behind their brethren of the Constituent Assembly. They are described in the following manner by Malouet,⁹

"Most of them, without having decided against a monarchy, had decided against the court, the aristocracy, and the clergy, ever imagining conspiracies and believing that defense consisted solely in attack. There were still many men of talent among them, but with no experience; they even lacked that which we had obtained. Our patriot deputies, in great part, were aware of their errors; the novices were not, they were ready to begin all over again."

Moreover, they have their own political bent, for nearly all of them are upstarts of the new régime. We find in their ranks 264 department administrators, 109 district administrators, 125 justices and prosecuting-attorneys, 68 mayors and town officers, besides about twenty officers of the National Guard, constitutional bishops and curés. The whole amounting to 566 of the elected functionaries, who, for the past twenty months, have carried on the government under the direction of their electors. We have seen how this was done and under what conditions, with what compliances and with what complicity, with what deference to clamorous opinion, with what docility in the presence of rioters, with what submission to the orders of the mob, with what a deluge of sentimental phrases and commonplace abstractions. Sent to Paris as deputies, through the choice or toleration of the clubs, they bear along with them their politics and their rhetoric. The result is an assemblage of narrow, perverted, hasty, inflated and feeble minds; at each daily session, twenty word- mills turn to no purpose, the greatest of public powers at once becoming a manufactory of nonsense, a school of extravagancies, and a theatre for declamation.

Degree and quality of their intelligence and Culture.

Is it possible that serious men could have listened to such weird nonsense until the bitter end?

"I am a tiller of the soil,"¹⁰ says one deputy, "I now dare speak of the antique nobility of my plow. A yoke of oxen once constituted the pure, incorruptible legal worthies before whom my good ancestors executed their contracts, the authenticity of which, far better recorded on the soil than on flimsy parchment, is protected from any species of revolution whatever."

Is it conceivable that the reporter of a law, that is about to exile or imprison forty thousand priests, should employ in an argument such silly bombast as the following?¹¹

"I have seen in the rural districts the hymeneal torch diffusing only pale and somber rays, or, transformed into the flambeaux of furies, the hideous skeleton of superstition seated even on the nuptial couch, placed between nature and the wedded, and arresting, etc. . . . Oh Rome, art thou satisfied? Art thou then like Saturn, to whom fresh holocausts were daily imperative? . . . Depart, ye creators of discord! The soil of liberty is weary of bearing you. Would ye breathe the atmosphere of the Aventine mount? The national ship is already prepared for you. I hear on the shore the impatient cries of the crew; I see the breezes of liberty swelling its sails. Like Telemachus, ye will go forth on the waters to seek your father; but never will you have to dread the Sicilian rocks, nor the seductions of a Eucharis."

Courtesies of pedants, rhetorical personifications, and the invective of maniacs is the prevailing tone. The same defect characterizes the best speeches, namely, an overexcited brain, a passion for high- sounding terms, the constant use of stilts and an incapacity for seeing things as they are and of so describing them. Men of talent, Isnard, Guadet, Vergniaud himself, are carried away by hollow sonorous phrases like a ship with too much canvas for its ballast. Their minds are stimulated by souvenirs of their school lessons, the modern world revealing itself to them only through their Latin reminiscences. -- François de Nantes is exasperated at the pope "who holds in servitude the posterity of Cato and of Scoevola." -- Isnard proposes to follow the example of the Roman senate which, to allay discord at home, got up an outside war: between old Rome and France of 1792, indeed, there is a striking resemblance. -- Roux insists that the Emperor (of Austria) should give satisfaction before the 1st of March; "in a case like this the Roman people would have fixed the term of delay; why shouldn't the French people fix one? . . ." "The circle of Popilius" should be drawn around those petty, hesitating German princes. When money is needed to establish camps around Paris and the large towns, Lasource proposes to dispose of the national forests and is amazed at any objection to the measure. "Coesar's soldiers," he exclaims, "believing that an ancient forest in Gaul was sacred, dared not lay the axe to it; are we to share their superstitious respect?"¹² -- - Add to this collegiate lore the philosophic dregs deposited in all minds by the great sophist then in vogue. Larivière reads in the tribune¹³ that page of the "Contrat Social," where Rousseau declares that the sovereign may banish members "of an unsocial religion," and punish with death "one who, having publicly recognized the dogmas of civil religion, acts as if he did not believe in them." On which, another hissing parrot, M. Filassier, exclaims, "I put J. J. Rousseau's proposition into the form of a motion and demand a vote on it." -- In like manner it is proposed to grant very young girls the right of marrying in spite of their parents by stating, according to the "Nouvelle Héloise"

"that a girl thirteen or fourteen years old begins to sigh for the union which nature dictates. She struggles between passion and duty, so that, if she triumphs, she becomes a martyr, something that is rare in nature. It may happen that a young person prefers the serene shame of defeat to a wearisome eight year long struggle."

Divorce is inaugurated to "preserve in matrimony that happy peace of mind which renders the sentiments livelier."¹⁴ Henceforth this will no longer be a chain but "the acquittance of an agreeable debt which every citizen owes to his country. . . Divorce is the protecting spirit of marriage."¹⁵

On a background of classic pedantry, with only vague and narrow notions of ordinary instruction, lacking exact and substantial information, flow obscenities and enlarged commonplaces enveloped in a mythological gauze, spouting in long tirades as maxims from the revolutionary manual. Such is the superficial culture and verbal argumentation from which vulgar and dangerous ingredients the intelligence of the new legislators is formed.¹⁶

Aspects of their sessions. -- Scenes and display at the club. -- Co- operation of spectators.

From this we can imagine what their sessions were. "More in-coherent and especially more passionate than those of the Constituent Assembly"¹⁷ they present the same but intensified characteristics. The argument is weaker, the invective more violent, and the dogmatism more intemperate. Inflexibility degenerates into insolence, prejudice into fanaticism, and near-sightedness into blindness. Disorder becomes a tumult and constant din an uproar. Suppose, says an eye- witness,

"a classroom with hundreds of pupils quarreling and every instant on the point of seizing each other by the hair. Their dress neglected, their attitudes angry, with sudden transitions from shouting to hooting . . is a sight hard to imagine and to which nothing can be compared."

It lacks nothing for making it a club of the lowest species. Here, in advance, we contemplate the ways of the future revolutionary inquisition. They welcome burlesque denunciations; enter into petty police investigations; weigh the tittle-tattle of porters and the gossip of servant-girls; devote an all-night session to the secrets of a drunkard.¹⁸ They enter on their official report and without any disapproval, the petition of M. Huré, "living at Pont-sur-Yonne, who, over his own signature, offers one hundred francs and his arm to become a killer of tyrants." Repeated and multiplied hurrahs and applause with the felicitations of the president is the sanction of scandalous or ridiculous private misconduct seeking to display itself under the cover of public authority. Anacharsis Clootz, "a Mascarille officially stamped," who proposes a general war and who hawks about maps of Europe cut up in advance into departments beginning with Savoy, Belgium and Holland "and thus onward to the Polar Sea," is thanked and given a seat on the benches of the Assembly.¹⁹ Compliments are made to the Vicar of Sainte-Marguerite and his wife is given a seat in the Assembly and who, introducing "his new family," thunders against clerical celibacy.²⁰ Crowds of men and women are permitted to traverse the hall letting out political cries. Every sort of indecent, childish and seditious parade is admitted to the bar of the house.²¹ To-day it consists of "citoyennes of Paris," desirous of being drilled in military exercises and of having for their commandants "former French guardsmen;" to-morrow children come and express their patriotism with "touching simplicity," regretting that "their trembling feet do not permit them to march, no, fly against the tyrants;" next to these come convicts of the Château -- Vieux escorted by a noisy crowd; at another time the artillerymen of Paris, a thousand in number, with drums beating; delegates from the provinces, the faubourgs and the clubs come constantly, with their furious harangues, and imperious remonstrances, their exactions, their threats and their summonses. -- In the intervals between the louder racket a continuous hubbub is heard in the clatter of the tribunes.²² At each session "the representatives are chaffed by the spectators; the nation in the gallery is judge of the nation on the floor;" it interferes in the debates, silences the speakers, insults the president and orders the reporter of a bill to quit the tribune. One interruption, or a simple murmur, is not all; there are twenty, thirty, fifty in an hour, clamoring, stamping, yells and personal abuse. After countless useless entreaties, after repeated calls to order, "received with hooting," after a dozen "regulations that are made, revised, countermanded and posted up" as if better to prove the impotence of the law, of the authorities and of the Assembly itself, the usurpations of these intruders keep on increasing. They have shouted for ten months "Down with the civil list! Down with the ministerials! Down with those curs! Silence, slaves!' On the 26th of July, Brissot himself is to appear lukewarm and be struck on the face with two plums. "Three or four hundred individuals without either property, title, or means of subsistence . . . have become the auxiliaries, petitioners and umpires of the legislature," their paid violence completely destroying whatever is still left of the Assembly's reason.²³

The Parties.- The "Right." -- "Center." -- The "Left." -- Opinions and sentiments of the Girondins. -- Their Allies of the extreme "left."

In an assembly thus composed and surrounded, it is easy to foresee on which side the balance will turn. -- Through the meshes of the electoral net which the Jacobins have spread over the whole country, about one hundred well-meaning individuals of the common run, tolerably sensible and sufficiently resolute, Mathieu Dumas, Dumolard, Becquet, Gorguereau, Vaublanc, Beugnot, Girardin, Ramond, Jaucourt, were able to pass and form the party of the "Right."²⁴ They resist to as great an extent as possible, and seem to have obtained a majority. -- For, of the four hundred deputies who have their seats in the center, one hundred and sixty-four are inscribed on the rolls with them at the Feuillants club, while the rest, under the title of "Independents," pretend to be of no party.²⁵ Besides, the whole of these four hundred, through monarchical traditions, respect the King; timid and sensible, violence is repugnant to them. They distrust the Jacobins, dread what is unknown, desire to be loyal to the Constitution and to live in peace. Nevertheless, the pompous dogmas of the revolutionary catechism still have their prestige with them; they cannot comprehend how the Constitution which they like produces the anarchy which they detest; they are "foolish enough to bemoan the effects while swearing to maintain their causes; totally deficient in spirit, in union and in boldness," they float backwards and forwards between contradictory desires, while their predisposition to order merely awaits the steady impulsion of a vigorous will to turn it in the opposite direction. -- On such docile material the "Left" can work effectively. It comprises, indeed, but one hundred and thirty-six registered Jacobins and about a hundred others who, in almost all cases, vote with the party;²⁶ rigidity of opinion, however, more than compensates for lack of numbers. In the front row are Guadet, Brissot, Gensonné, Veygniaud, Ducos, and Condorcet, the future chiefs of the Girondists, all of them lawyers or writers captivated by deductive politics, absolute in their convictions and proud of their faith. According to them principles are true and must be applied without reservation;²⁷ whoever would stop half-way is wanting in courage or intelligence. As for themselves their minds are made up to push through. With the self-confidence of youth and of theorists they draw their own conclusions and hug themselves with their strong belief in them. "These gentlemen," says a keen observer,²⁸

"professed great disdain for their predecessors, the Constituents, treating them as short-sighted and prejudiced people incapable of profiting by circumstances."

"To the observations of wisdom, and disinterested wisdom,²⁹ they replied with a scornful smile, indicative of the aridity proceeding from self-conceit. One exhausted himself in reminding them of events and in deducing causes from these; one passed in turn from theory to experience and from experience to theory to show them their identity and, when they condescended to reply it was to deny the best authenticated facts and contest the plainest observations by opposing to these a few trite maxims although eloquently expressed. Each regarded the other as if they alone were worthy of being heard, each encouraging the other with the idea that all resistance to their way of looking at things was pusillanimity."

In their own eyes they alone are capable and they alone are patriotic. Because they have read Rousseau and Mably, because their tongue is untied and their pen flowing, because they know how to handle the formuloe of books and reason out an abstract proposition, they fancy that they are statesmen.³⁰ Because they have read Plutarch and "Le Jeune Anacharsis," because they aim to construct a perfect society out of metaphysical conceptions, because they are in a ferment about the coming millennium, they imagine themselves so many exalted spirits. They have no doubt whatever on these two points even after everything has fallen in through their blunders, even after their obliging hands are sullied by the foul grasp of robbers whom they were the first to instigate, and by that of executioners of which they are partners in complicity.³¹ To this extent is self-conceit the worst of sophists. Convinced of their superior enlightenment and of the purity of their sentiments, they put forth the theory that the government should be in their hands. Consequently they lay hold of it in the Legislative body in ways that are going to turn against them in the Convention. They accept for allies the worst demagogues of the extreme "Left," Chabot, Couthon, Merlin, Bazière, Thuriot, Lecointre, and outside of it, Danton, Robespierre, Marat himself, all the levelers and destroyers whom they think of use to them, but of whom they themselves are the instruments. The motions they make must pass at any cost and, to ensure this, they let loose against their adversaries the low, yelping mob which others, still more factious, will to-morrow let loose on them.

Their means of action. -- Dispersion of the Feuillants' club. -- Pressure of the tribunes on the Assembly. -- Street mobs.

Thus, for the second time, the pretended freedom fighters seek power by boldly employing force. -- They begin by suppressing the meetings of the Feuillants club.³² The customary riot is instigated against these, whereupon ensue tumult, violent outcries and scuffles; mayor Pétion complains of his position "between opinion and law," and lets things take their course; finally, the Feuillants are obliged to evacuate their place of meeting. -- Inside the Assembly they are abandoned to the insolence of the galleries. In vain do they get exasperated and protest. Ducastel, referring to the decree of the Constituent Assembly, which forbids any manifestation of approbation or disapprobation, is greeted with murmurs. He insists on the decree being read at the opening of each session, and "the murmurs begin again."³³ "Is it not scandalous," says Vaublanc, "that the nation's representatives speaking from the tribune are subject to hootings like those bestowed upon an actor on the stage!" whereupon the galleries give him three rounds more. "Will posterity believe," says Quatremère, "that acts concerning the honor, the lives, and the fortunes of citizens should be subject, like games in the arena, to the applause and hisses of the spectators!" "Come to the point!" shout the galleries. "If ever," resumes Quatremère, "the most important of judicial acts (an act of capital indictment) can be exposed to this scandalous prostitution of applause and menaces . . . " "The murmurs break out afresh." -- Every time that a sanguinary or incendiary measure is to be carried, the most furious and prolonged clamor stops the utterance of its opponents: "Down with the speaker! Send the reporter of that bill to prison! Down! Down! Sometimes only about twenty of the deputies will applaud or hoot with the galleries, and sometimes it is the entire Assembly which is insulted. Fists are thrust in the president's face. All that now remains is "to call down the galleries on the floor to pass decrees," which proposition is ironically made by one of the "Right."³⁴

Great, however, as this usurpation may be, the minority, in order to suppress the majority, accommodate themselves to it, the Jacobins in the chamber making common cause with the Jacobins in the galleries. The disturbers should not be put out; "it would be excluding from our deliberations," says Grangeneuve, "that which belongs essentially to the people." On one of the deputies demanding measures to enforce silence, "Torné demands that the proposition be referred to the Portugal inquisition." Choudieu "declares that it can only emanate from deputies who forget that respect which is due to the people, their sovereign judge."³⁵ "The action of the galleries," says Lecointe-Puyraiveaux, "is an outburst of patriotism." Finally, this same Choudieu, twisting and turning all rights about with incomparable audacity, wishes to confer legislative privileges on the audience, and demands a decree against the deputies who, guilty of popular lèse- majesté, presume to complain of those who insult them. -- Another piece of oppressive machinery, still more energetic, operates outside on the approaches to the Assembly. Like their predecessors of the Constituent Assembly, the members of the "Right" "cannot leave the building without encountering the threats and imprecations of enraged crowds. Cries of 'to the lantern!' greet the ears of Dumolard, Vaublanc, Raucourd, and Lacretelle as often as those of the Abbé Maury and Montlosier."³⁶ After having hurled abuse at the president, Mathieu Dumas, they insult his wife who has been recognized in a reserved gallery.³⁷ In the Tuileries, crowds are always standing there listening to the brawlers who denounce suspected deputies by name, and woe to any among them who takes that path on his way to the chamber! A broadside of insults greets him as he passes along. If the deputy happens to be a farmer, they exclaim: "Look at that queer old aristocrat -- an old peasant dog that used to watch cows!" One day Hua, on going up the steps of the Tuileries terrace, is seized by the hair by an old vixen who bids him "Bow your head to your sovereigns, the people, you bastard of a deputy!" On the 20th of June one of the patriots, who is crossing the Assembly room, whispers in his ear, "You scamp of a deputy, you'll never die but by my hand!" Another time, having defended the juge-de-paix Larivière, there awaits him at the door, in the middle of the night, "a set of blackguards, who crowd around him and thrust their fists and cudgels in his face;" happily, his friends Dumas and Daverhoult, two military officers, foreseeing the danger, present their pistols and set him free "although with some difficulty." -- As the 10th of August draws near there is more open aggression. Vaublanc, for having defended Lafayette, just misses being cut to pieces three times on leaving the Assembly; sixty of the deputies are treated in the same fashion, being struck, covered with mud, and threatened with death if they dare go back.³⁸ -- With such allies a minority is very strong. Thanks to its two agencies of constraint it will detach the votes it needs from the majority and, either through terror or craft, secure the passage of all the decrees it needs.

Parliamentary maneuvers. -- Abuses of urgency. -- Vote on the principle. -- Call by name. -Intimidation of the "Center." -- Opponents inactive. -- The majority finally disposed of.

Sometimes it succeeds surreptitiously by rushing them through. As "there is no order of the day circulated beforehand, and, in any event, none which anybody is obliged to adhere to,"³⁹ the Assembly is captured by surprise. "The first knave amongst the 'Left,' (which expression, says Hua, I do not strike out, because there were many among those gentlemen), brought up a ready-made resolution, prepared the evening before by a clique. We were not prepared for it and demanded that it should be referred to a committee. Instead of doing this, however, the resolution was declared urgent, and, whether we would or not, discussion had to take place forthwith."⁴⁰ -- "There were other tactics equally perfidious, which Thuriot, especially, made use of. This great rascal got up and proposed, not the draft of a law, but what he called a principle; for instance, a decree should be passed confiscating the property of the émigrés, . . or that unsworn priests should be subject to special surveillance.⁴¹ . . . In reply, he was told that his principle was the core of a law, the very law itself; so let it be debated by referring it to a committee to make a report on it. -- Not at all -- the matter is urgent; a committee might fix the articles as it pleases; they are worthless if the principle is not common sense." Through this expeditious method discussion is stifled. The Jacobins purposely prevent the Assembly from giving the matter any consideration. They count on its bewilderment. In the name of reason, they discard reason as far as they can, and hasten a vote because their decrees do not stand up to analysis. -- At other times, and especially on grand occasions, they compel a vote. In general, votes are given by the members either sitting down or standing up, and, for the four hundred deputies of the "Center," subject to the scolding of the exasperated galleries, it is a tolerably hard trial. "Part of them do not arise, or they rise with the 'Left'."⁴² If the "Right" happens to have a majority, "this is contested in bad faith and a call of the house is demanded." Now, "the calls of the house, through an intolerable abuse, are always published; the Jacobins declaring that it is well for the people to know their friends from their enemies." The meaning of this is that this list of the opposition will soon serve as a list of the outlaws, on which the timid are not disposed to inscribe themselves. The result is an immediate defection in the heavy battalions of the "Centre"; "this is a positive fact," says Hua, "of which we were all witnesses; we always lost a hundred votes on the call of the house." -- Towards the end they give up, and protest no more, except by staying away: on the 14th of June, when the abolishment of the whole system of feudal credit was being dealt with, only the extreme left was attending; the rest of the "Assembly hall was nearly empty"; out of 497 deputies in attendance, 200 had left the session.⁴³ Encouraged for a moment by the appearance of some possible protection, they twice exonerate General Lafayette, behind whom they see an army,⁴⁴ and brave the despots of the Assembly, the clubs, and the streets. But, for lack of a military chief and base, the visible majority is twice obliged to yield, to keep silent, and fly or retreat under the dictatorship of the victorious faction, which has strained and forced the legislative machine until it has become disjointed and broken down.⁴⁵

Policy of the Assembly. -- State of France at the end of 1791. -- Powerlessness of the Law.

If the deputies who, on the 1st of October, 1791, so solemnly and enthusiastically swore to the Constitution, had been willing to open their eyes, they would have seen this Constitution constantly violated, both in its letter and spirit, over the entire territory. As usual, and through the vanity of authorship, M. Thouret, the last president of the Constituent Assembly, had, in his final report, hidden disagreeable truth underneath pompous and delusive phrases; but it was only necessary to look over the monthly record to see whether, as guaranteed by him, "the decrees were faithfully executed in all parts of the empire." -- " Where is this faithful execution to be found?" inquires Mallet du Pan.¹ "Is it at Toulon, in the midst of the dead and wounded, shot in the very face of the amazed municipality and Directory? Is it at Marseilles, where two private individuals are knocked down and massacred as aristocrats," under the pretext "that they sold to children poisoned sugar-plums with which to begin a counter-revolution?" Is it at Arles, "against which 4,000 men from Marseilles, dispatched by the club, are at this moment marching?" Is it at Bayeux, "where the sieur Fauchet against whom a warrant for arrest is out, besides being under the ban of political disability, has just been elected deputy to the Legislative Assembly?" Is it at Blois, "where the commandant, doomed to death for having tried to execute these decrees, is forced to send away a loyal regiment and submit to licentious troops?" Is it at Nîmes, "where the Dauphiny regiment, on leaving the town by the Minister's orders, is ordered by the people" and the club "to disobey the Minister and remain?" Is it in those regiments whose officers, with pistols at their breasts, are obliged to leave and give place to amateurs? Is it at Toulouse, "where, at the end of August, the administrative authorities order all unsworn priests to leave the town in three days, and withdraw to a distance of four leagues?" Is it in the outskirts of Toulouse, "where, on the 28th of August, a municipal officer is hung at a street-lamp after an affray with guns?" Is it at Paris, where, on the 25th of September, the Irish college, vainly protected by an international treaty, has just been assailed by the mob; where Catholics, listening to the orthodox mass, are driven out and dragged to the authorized mass in the vicinity; where one woman is torn from the confessional, and another flogged with all their might?²

These troubles, it is said, are transient; on the Constitution being proclaimed, order will return of itself. Very well, the Constitution is voted, accepted by the King, proclaimed, and entrusted to the Legislative Assembly. Let the Legislative Assembly consider what is done in the first few weeks. In the eight departments that surround Paris, there are riots on every market-day; farms are invaded and the cultivators of the soil are ransomed by bands of vagabonds; the mayor of Melun is riddled with balls and dragged out from the hands of the mob streaming with blood.³ At Belfort, a riot for the purpose of retaining a convoy of coin, and the commissioner of the Upper-Rhine in danger of death; at Bouxvillers, owners of property attacked by poor National Guards, and by the soldiers of Salm-Salm, houses broken into and cellars pillaged; at Mirecourt, a flock of women beating drums, and, for three days, holding the Hôtel-de-Ville in a state of siege. -- - One day Rochefort is in a state of insurrection, and the workmen of the harbor compel the municipality to unfurl the red flag.⁴ On the following day, it is Lille, the people of which, "unwilling to exchange its money and assignats for paper-rags, called billets de confiance, gather into mobs and threaten, while a whole garrison is necessary to prevent an explosion." On the 16th of October, it is Avignon in the power of bandits, with the abominable butchery of the Glacière. On the 5th of November, at Caen, there are eighty-two gentlemen, townsmen and artisans, knocked down and dragged to prison, for having offered their services to the municipality as special constables. On the 14th of November, at Montpellier, the roughs triumph; eight men and women are killed in the streets or in their houses, and all conservatives are disarmed or put to flight. By the end of October, it is a gigantic column of smoke and flame shooting upward suddenly from week to week and spreading everywhere, growing, on the other side of the Atlantic, into civil war in St. Domingo, where wild beasts are let loose against their keepers; 50,000 blacks take the field, and, at the outset, 1,000 whites are assassinated, 15,000 Negroes slain, 200 sugar-mills destroyed and damage done to the amount of 600,000,000; "a colony of itself alone worth ten provinces, is almost annihilated."⁵ At Paris, Condorcet is busy writing in his journal that "this news is not reliable, there being no object in it but to create a French empire beyond the seas for the King, where there will be masters and slaves." A corporal of the Paris National Guard, on his own authority, orders the King to remain indoors, fearing that he may escape, and forbids a sentinel to let him go out after nine o'clock in the evening;⁶ at the Tuileries, stump-speakers in the open air denounce aristocrats and priests; at the Palais-Royal, there is a pandemonium of public lust and incendiary speeches.⁷ There are centers of riot in all quarters, "as many robberies as there are quarter-hours, and no robbers punished; no police; overcrowded courts; more delinquents than there are prisons to hold them; nearly all the private mansions closed; the annual consumption in the faubourg St. Germain alone diminished by 250 millions; 20,000 thieves, with branded backs, idling away time in houses of bad repute, at the theaters, in the Palais-Royal, at the National Assembly, and in the coffee-houses; thousands of beggars infesting the streets, crossways, and public squares. Everywhere an image of the deepest poverty which is not calling for one's pity as it is accompanied with insolence. Swarms of tattered vendors are offering all sorts of paper-money, issued by anybody that chose to put it in circulation, cut up into bits, sold, given, and coming back in rags, fouler than the miserable creatures who deal in it."⁸ Out of 700,000 inhabitants there are 100,000 of the poor, of which 60,000 have flocked in from the departments;⁹ among them are 30,000 needy artisans from the national workshops, discharged and sent home in the preceding month of June, but who, returning three months later, are again swallowed up in the great sink of vagabondage, hurling their floating mass against the crazy edifice of public authority and furnishing the forces of sedition. -- At Paris, and in the provinces, disobedience exists throughout the hierarchy. Directories countermand ministerial orders. Here, municipalities brave the commands of their Directory; there, communities order around their mayor with a drawn sword. Elsewhere, soldiers and sailors put their officers under arrest. The accused insult the judge on the bench and force him to cancel his verdict; mobs tax or plunder wheat in the market; National Guards prevent its distribution, or seize it in the storehouses. There is no security for property, lives, or consciences. The majority of Frenchmen are deprived of their right to worship in their own faith, and of voting at the elections. There is no safety, day or night, for the élite of the nation, for ecclesiastics and the gentry, for army and navy officers, for rich merchants and large landed proprietors; no protection in the courts, no income from public funds; denunciations abound, expulsions, banishments to the interior, attacks on private houses; there is no right of free assemblage, even to enforce the law under the orders of legal authorities.¹⁰ Opposed to this, and in contrast with it, is the privilege and immunity of a sect formed into a political corporation, "which extends its filiations over the whole kingdom, and even abroad; which has its own treasury, its committees, and its by-laws; which rules the government, which judges justice,"¹¹ and which, from the capital to the hamlet, usurps or directs the administration. Liberty, equality, and the majesty of the law exist nowhere, except in words. Of the three thousand decrees given birth to by the Constituent Assembly, the most lauded, those the best set off by a philosophic baptism, form a mass of stillborn abortions of which France is the burying-ground. That which really subsists underneath the false appearances of right, proclaimed and sworn to over and over again, is, on the one hand, an oppression of the upper and cultivated classes, from which all the rights of man are withdrawn, and, on the other hand, the tyranny of the fanatical and brutal rabble which assumes to itself all the rights of sovereignty.

The Assembly hostile to the oppressed and favoring oppressors. -- Decrees against the nobles and clergy. -- Amnesty for deserters, convicts, and bandits. -- Anarchical and leveling maxims.

In vain do the honest men of the Assembly protest against this scandal and this overthrow. The Assembly, guided and forced by the Jacobins, will only amend the law to damn the oppressed and to authorize their oppressors. -- Without making any distinction between armed assemblages at Coblentz, which it had a right to punish, and refugees, three times as numerous, old men, women and children, so many indifferent and inoffensive people, not merely nobles but plebeians,¹² who left the soil only to escape popular outrages, it confiscates the property of all emigrants and orders this to be sold.¹³ Through the new restriction of the passport, those who remain are tied to their domiciles, their freedom of movement, even in the interior, being subject to the decision of each Jacobin municipality.¹⁴ It completes their ruin by depriving them without indemnity of all income from their real estate, of all the seignorial rights which the Constituent Assembly had declared to be legitimate.¹⁵ It abolishes, as far as it can, their history and their past, by burning in the public depots their genealogical titles.¹⁶ -- To all unsworn ecclesiastics, two-thirds of the French clergy, it withholds bread, the small pension allowed them for food, which is the ransom of their confiscated possessions;¹⁷ it declares them "suspected of revolt against the law and of bad intentions against the country;" it subjects them to special surveillance; it authorizes their expulsion without trial by local rulers in case of disturbances; it decrees that in such cases they shall be banished.¹⁸ It suppresses "all secular congregations of men and women ecclesiastic or laic, even those wholly devoted to hospital service will take away from 600,000 children the means of learning to read and write."¹⁹ It lays injunctions on their dress; it places episcopal palaces in the market for sale, also the buildings still occupied by monks and nuns.²⁰ It welcomes with rounds of applause a married priest who introduces his wife to the Assembly. -- Not only is the Assembly destructive but it is insulting; the authors of each decree passed by it add to its thunderbolt the rattling hail of their own abuse and slander.

"Children," says a deputy, "have the poison of aristocracy and fanaticism injected into them by the congregations."²¹

"Purge the rural districts of the vermin which is devouring them!" -- "Everybody knows," says Isnard, "that the priest is as cowardly as he is vindictive. . . Let these pestiferous fellows be sent back to Roman and Italian lazarettos . . What religion is that which, in its nature, is unsocial and rebellious in principle?"

Whether unsworn, whether immigrants actually or in feeling, "large proprietors, rich merchants, false conservatives,"²² are all outspoken conspirators or concealed enemies. All public disasters are imputed to them. "The cause of the troubles," says Brissot,²³ "which lay waste the colonies, is the infernal vanity of the whites who have three times violated an engagement which they have three times sworn to maintain." Scarcity of work and short crops are accounted for through their cunning malevolence.

"A large number of rich men, "says François de Nantes,²⁴ "allow their property to run down and their fields to lie fallow, so as to enjoy seeing the suffering of the people."

France is divided into two parties, on the one hand, the aristocracy to which is attributed every vice, and, on the other hand, the people on whom is conferred every virtue.²⁵

"The defense of liberty," says Lamarque,²⁶ "is basely abandoned every day by the rich and by the former nobility, who put on the mask of patriotism only to cheat us. It is not in this class, but only in that of citizens who are disdainfully called the people, that we find pure beings, those ardent souls really worthy of liberty." -- One step more and everything will be permitted to the virtuous against the wicked; if misfortune befalls the aristocrats so much the worse for them. Those officers who are stoned, M. de la Jaille and others, "wouldn't they do better not to deserve being sacrificed to popular fury?"²⁷ Isnard exclaims in the tribune, "it is the long-continued immunity enjoyed by criminals which has rendered the people executioners. Yes, an angry people, like an angry God, is only too often the terrible supplement of silent laws."²⁸ -- In other words crimes are justified and assassinations still provoked against those who have been assassinated for the past two years.

By a forced conclusion, if the victims are criminals, their executioners are honest, and the Assembly, which rigorously proceeds against the former, reserves all its indulgence for the latter. It reinstates the numerous deserters who abandoned their flags previous to the 1st of January, 1789;²⁹ it allows them three sous per league mileage, and brings them back to their homes or to their regiments to become, along with their brethren whose desertion is more recent, either leaders or recruits for the mob. It releases from the galleys the forty Swiss guards of Chateauroux whom their own cantons desired to have kept there; it permits these "'martyrs to Liberty " to promenade the streets of Paris in a triumphal car;³⁰ it admits them to the bar of the house, and, taking a formal vote on it, extends to them the honors of the session.³¹ Finally, as if it were their special business to let loose on the public the most ferocious and foulest of the rabble, it amnesties Jourdan, Mainvielle, Duprat, and Raphel, fugitive convicts, jail-birds, the condottieri of all lands assuming the title of "the brave brigands of Avignon," and who, for eighteen months, have pillaged and plundered the Comtat³²; it stops the trial, almost over, of the Glacière butchers; it tolerates the return of these as victors,³³ and their installation by their own act in the places of the fugitive magistrates, allowing Avignon to be treated as a conquered city, and, henceforth, to become their prey and their booty. This is a willful restoration of the vermin to the social body, and, in this feverish body, nothing is overlooked that will increase the fever. The most anarchical and deleterious maxims emanate, like miasma, from the Assembly benches. The reduction of things to an absolute level is adopted as a principle; "equality of rights," says Lamarque,³⁴ "is to be maintained only by tending steadily to an equality of fortunes;" this theory is practically applied on all sides since the proletariat is pillaging all who own property. -- "Let the communal possessions be partitioned among the citizens of the surrounding villages," says François de Nantes, "in an inverse ratio to their fortunes, and let him who has the least inheritance take the largest share in the divisions."³⁵ Conceive the effect of this motion read at evening to peasants who are at this very moment claiming their lord's forest for their commune. M. Corneille prohibits any tax to be levied for the public treasury on the wages of manual labor, because nature, and not society, gives us the "right to live."³⁶ On the other hand, he confers on the public treasury the right of taking the whole of an income, because it is society, and not nature, which institutes public funds; hence, according to him, the poor majority must be relieved of all taxation, and all taxes must fall on the rich minority. The system is well-timed and the argument apt for convincing indigent or straitened tax-payers, namely, the refractory majority, that its taxes are just, and that it should not refuse to be taxed. --

"Under the reign of liberty," says President Daverhoult,³⁷ "the people have the right to insist not merely on subsistence, but again on plenty and happiness."³⁸

Accordingly, being in a state of poverty they have been betrayed. -- "Elevated to the height achieved by the French people," says another president, "it looks down upon the tempests under its feet."³⁹ The tempest is at hand and bursts over its head. War, like a black cloud, rises above the horizon, overspreads the sky, thunders and wraps France filled with explosive materials in a circle of lightening, and it is the Assembly which, through the greatest of its mistakes, draws down the bolt on the nation's head.

War. -- Disposition of foreign powers. -- The King's dislikes. -- Provocation of the Girondins. -- Dates and causes of the rupture.

It might have been turned aside with a little prudence. Two principal grievances were alleged, one by France and the other by the Empire. -- On the one hand, and very justly, France complained of the gathering of émigré's, which the Emperor and Electors tolerated against it on the frontier. In the first place, however, a few thousand gentlemen, without troops or stores, and nearly without money,⁴⁰ were hardly to be feared, and, besides this, long before the decisive hour came these troops were dispersed, at once by the Emperor in his own dominions, and, fifteen days afterwards, by the Elector of Trèves in his electorate.⁴¹ -- On the other hand, according to treaties, the German princes, who owned estates in Alsace, made claims for the feudal rights abolished on their French possessions and the Diet forbade them to accept the offered indemnity. But, as far as the Diet is concerned, nothing was easier nor more customary than to let negotiations drag along, there being no risk or inconvenience attending the suit as, during the delay, the claimants remained empty- handed. -- If, now, behind the ostensible motives, the real intentions are sought for, it is certain that, up to January, 1792, the intentions of Austria were pacific. The grants made to the Comte d'Artois, in the Declaration of Pilnitz, were merely a court- sprinkling of holy-water, the semblance of an illusory promise and subject to a European concert of action, that is to say, annulled beforehand by an indefinite postponement, while this pretended league of sovereigns is at once "placed by the politicians in the class of august comedies.⁴²" Far from taking up arms against "New France" in the name of old France, the emperor Leopold and his prime minister Kaunitz, were delighted to see the constitution completed and accepted by the King; it "got them out of an embarrassing position,"⁴³ and Prussia as well. In the running of governments, political advantage is the great incentive and both powers needed all their forces in another direction, in Poland. One for retarding, and the other for accelerating the division of this country, and both, when the partition took place, to get enough for themselves and prevent Russia from getting too much. -- The sovereigns of Prussia and Austria, accordingly, did not have any idea of saving Louis XVI, nor of conducting the émigrés back, nor of conquering French provinces. If anything was to be expected from them on account of personal ill-will, there was no fear of their armed intervention. -- In France it is not the King who urges a rupture; he knows too well that the hazards of war will place him and his dependents in mortal danger. Secretly as well as publicly, in writing to the émigrés, his wishes are to bring them back or to restrain them. In his private correspondence he asks of the European powers not physical but moral aid, the external support of a congress which will permit moderate men, the partisans of order, all owners of property, to raise their heads and rally around the throne and the laws against anarchy. In his ministerial correspondence every precaution is taken not to touch off or let someone touch off an explosion. At the critical moment of the discussion⁴⁴ he entreats the deputies, through M. Delessart, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, to weigh their words and especially not to send a demand containing a "dead line." He resists, as far as his passive nature allows him, to the very last. On being forced to declare war he requires beforehand the signed advice of all his ministers. He does not utter the fatal words, until he, "with tears in his eyes" and in the most dire straits, is dragged on by an Assembly qualifying all caution as treason and which has just dispatched M. Delessart to appear, under a capital charge, before the supreme court at Orléans.

It is the Assembly then which launches the disabled ship on the roaring abysses of an unknown sea, without a rudder and leaking at every seam. It alone slips the cable which held it in port and which the foreign powers neither dared nor desired to sever. Here, again, the Girondists are the leaders and hold the axe; since the last of October they have grasped it and struck repeated blows.⁴⁵ -- As an exception, the extreme Jacobins, Couthon, Collot d'Herbois, Danton, Robespierre, do not side with them. Robespierre, who at first proposed to confine the Emperor "within the circle of Popilius,"⁴⁶ fears the placing of too great a power in the King's hands, and, growing mistrustful, preaches distrust. -- But the great mass of the party, led by clamorous public opinion, impels on the timid marching in front. Of the many things of which knowledge is necessary to conduct successfully such a complex and delicate affair, they know nothing. They are ignorant about cabinets, courts, populations, treaties, precedents, timely forms and requisite style. Their guide and counselor in foreign relations is Brissot whose pre-eminence is based on their ignorance and who, exalted into a statesman, becomes for a few months the most conspicuous figure in Europe.⁴⁷ To whatever extent a European calamity may be attributed to any one man, this one is to be attributed to him. It is this wretch, born in a pastry-cook's shop, brought up in an attorney's office, formerly a police agent at 150 francs per month, once in league with scandal-mongers and black- mailers,⁴⁸ a penny-a-liner, busybody, and meddler, who, with the half-information of a nomad, scraps of newspaper ideas and reading- room lore,⁴⁹ added to his scribblings as a writer and his club declamation, directs the destinies of France and starts a war in Europe which is to destroy six millions of lives. In the attic where his wife is washing his shirts, he enjoys rebuking rulers and, on the 20th of October, in the tribune,⁵⁰ he begins by insulting thirty foreign sovereigns. Such keen, intense enjoyment is the stuff on which the new fanaticism daily feeds itself. Madame Roland herself delights, with evident complacency, in it, something which can be seen in the two famous letters in which, with a supercilious tone, she first instructs the King and next the Pope.⁵¹ Brissot, at bottom, regards himself as a Louis XIV, and expressly invites the Jacobins to imitate the haughty ways of the Great Monarch.⁵² -- To the tactlessness of the intruder, and the touchiness of the parvenu, we can add the rigidity of the sectarian. The Jacobins, in the name of abstract rights, deny historic rights; they impose from above, and by force, that truth of which they are the apostles, and allow themselves every provocation which they prohibit to others.

"Let us tell Europe," cries Isnard,⁵³ "that ten millions of Frenchmen, armed with the sword, with the pen, with reason, with eloquence, might, if provoked, change the face of the world and make tyrants tremble on their thrones of clay."

"Wherever a throne exists," says Hérault de Séchelles, "there is an enemy."⁵⁴

"An honest peace between tyranny and liberty," says Brissot, "is impossible. Our Constitution is an eternal anathema to absolute monarchs . . . It places them on trial, it pronounces judgment on them; it seems to say to each: to-morrow thou have ceased to be or shalt be king only through the people. . . War is now a national benefit, and not to have war is the only calamity to be dreaded." ⁵⁵

" Tell the king," says Gensonné, "that the war is a must, that public opinion demands it, that the safety of the empire makes it a law."⁵⁶

"The state we are in," concludes Vergniaud, "is a veritable state of destruction that may lead us to disgrace and death. So then to arms! to arms! Citizens, freemen, defend your liberty, confirm the hopes of that of the human race. . . Lose not the advantage of your position. Attack now that there is every sign of complete success. . . The spirits of past generations seem to me crowding into this temple to conjure you, in the name of the evils which slavery had compelled them to endure, to protect the future generations whose destinies are in your hands! Let this prayer be granted! Be for the future a new Providence! Ally yourselves with eternal justice!"⁵⁷

Among the Marseilles speakers there is no longer any room for serious discussion. Brissot, in reply to the claim made by the Emperor on behalf of the princes' property in Alsatia, replies that "the sovereignty of the people is not bound by the treaties of tyrants."⁵⁸ As to the gatherings of the émigrés, the Emperor having yielded on this point, he will yield on the others.⁵⁹ Let him formally renounce all combinations against France.

"I want war on the 10th of February," says Brissot, "unless we have received his renunciation."

No explanations; it is satisfaction we want; "to require satisfaction is to put the Emperor at our mercy."⁶⁰ The Assembly, so eager to start the quarrel, usurps the King's right to take the first step and formally declares war, fixing the date.⁶¹ -- The die is now cast.

"They want war," says the Emperor, "and they shall have it."

Austria immediately forms an alliance with Prussia, threatened, like herself, with revolutionary propaganda.⁶² By sounding the alarm belles the Jacobins, masters of the Assembly, have succeeded in bringing about that "monstrous alliance," and, from day to day, this alarm sounds the louder. One year more, thanks to this policy, and France will have all Europe for an enemy and as its only friend, the Regency of Algiers, whose internal system of government is about the same as her own.

Secret motives of the leaders. -- Their control compromised by peace. -- Discontent of the rich and cultivated class. -- Formation and increase of the party of order. -- The King and this party reconciled.

Behind their carmagnoles⁶³ we can detect a design which they will avow later on.

"We were always obstructed by the Constitution," Brissot is to say, "and nothing but war could destroy the Constitution."⁶⁴

Diplomatic wrongs, consequently, of which they make parade, are simply pretexts; if they urge war it is for the purpose of overthrowing the legal order of things which annoys them; their real object is the conquests of power, a second internal revolution, the application of their system and a final state of equality. -- Concealed behind them is the most politic and absolute of theorists, a man "whose great art is the attainment of his ends without showing himself, the preparation of others for far-sighted views of which they have no suspicion, and that of speaking but little in public and acting in secret."⁶⁵ This man is Sieyès, "the leader of everything without seeming to lead anything."⁶⁶ As infatuated as Rousseau with his own speculations, but as unscrupulous and as clear-sighted as Macchiavelli in the selection of practical means, he was, is, and will be, in decisive moments, the consulting counsel of radical democracy.

"His pride tolerates no superiority. He causes nobility to be abolished because he is not a noble; because he does not possess all he will destroy all. His fundamental doctrine for the consolidation of the Revolution is, that it is indispensable to change religion and to change the dynasty."

Now, had peace been maintained all this was impossible; moreover the ascendance of the party was compromised. Entire classes that had adhered to the party when it launched insurrection against the privileged, broke loose from it now that insurrection was directed against them; among thoughtful men and among those with property, most were disgusted with anarchy, and likewise disgusted with the abettors of it. Many administrators, magistrates and functionaries recently elected, loudly complained of their authority being subject to the mob. Many cultivators, manufacturers and merchants have become silently exasperated at the fruits of their labor and economy being surrendered at discretion to robbers and the indigent. It was hard for the flour-dealers of Etampes not to dare send away their wheat, to be obliged to supply customers at night, to tremble in their own houses, and to know that if they went out-doors they risked their lives.⁶⁷ It was hard for wholesale grocers in Paris to see their warehouses invaded, their windows smashed, their bags of coffee and boxes of sugar valued at a low price, parceled out and carried away by old hags or taken gratis by scamps who ran off and sold them at the other end of the street.⁶⁸ It was hard in all places for the families of the old bourgeoisie, for the formerly prominent men in each town and village, for the eminent in each art, profession or trade, for reputable and well-to-do people, in short, for the majority of men who had a good roof over their heads and a good coat on their backs, to undergo the illegal domination of a crowd led by a few hundred or dozens of stump-speakers and firebrands. -- Already, in the beginning of 1792, this dissatisfaction was so great as to be denounced in the tribune and in the press. Isnard⁶⁹ railed against "that multitude of large property-holders, those opulent merchants, those haughty, wealthy personages who, advantageously placed in the social amphitheater, are unwilling to have their seats changed." The bourgeoisie," wrote Pétion,⁷⁰ "that numerous class free of any anxiety, is separating itself from the people; it considers itself above them, . . . they are the sole object of its distrust. It is everywhere haunted by the one idea that the revolution is a war between those who have and those who have not." -- It abstains, indeed, from the elections, it keeps away from patriotic clubs, it demands the restoration of order and the reign of law; it rallies to itself "the multitude of conservative, timid people, for whom tranquility is the prime necessity," and especially, which is still more serious, it charges the disturbances upon their veritable authors. With suppressed indignation and a mass of undisputed evidence, André Chénier, a man of feeling, starts up in the midst of the silent crowd and openly tears off the mask from the Jacobins.⁷¹ He brings into full light the daily sophism by which a mob, "some hundreds of idlers gathered in a garden or at a theater, are impudently called the people." He portrays those "three or four thousand usurpers of national sovereignty whom their orators and writers daily intoxicate with grosser incense than any adulation offered to the worst of despots;" those assemblies where "an infinitely small number of French appears large, because they are united and yell;" that Paris club from which honest, industrious, intelligent people had withdrawn one by one to give place to intriguers in debt, to persons of tarnished reputations, to the hypocrites of patriotism, to the lovers of uproar, to abortive talents, to corrupted intellects, to outcasts of every kind and degree who, unable to manage their own business, indemnify themselves by managing that of the public. He shows how, around the central factory and its twelve hundred branches of insurrection, the twelve hundred affiliated clubs, which, "holding each other's hands, form a sort of electric chain around all France" and giving it a shock at every touch from the center; their confederation, installed and enthroned, is not only as a State within the State, but rather as a sovereign State in a vassal State; summoning their administrative bodies to their bar, judicial verdicts set aside through their intervention, private individuals searched, assessed and condemned through their verdicts. All this constitutes a steady, systematic defense of insubordination and revolt; as, "under the name of hoarding and monopoly, commerce and industry are described as misdemeanors;" property is unsettled and every rich man rendered suspicious, "talent and integrity silenced." In short, a public conspiracy made against society in the very name of society, "while the sacred symbol of liberty is made use of as a seal" to exempt a few tyrants from punishment. Such a protest said aloud what most Frenchmen muttered to themselves, and from month to month, graver excesses exited greater censure.

"Anarchy exists⁷² to a degree scarcely to be paralleled, wrote the ambassador of the United States. The horror and apprehension, which the licentious associations have universally inspired, are such that there is reason to believe that the great mass of the French population would consider even despotism a blessing, if accompanied with that security to persons and property, experienced even under the worst governments in Europe."

Another observer, not less competent,⁷³ says:

"it is plain to my eyes that when Louis XVI. finally succumbed, he had more partisans in France than the year previous, at the time of his flight to Varennes."

The truth of this, indeed, was frequently verified at the end of 1791 and beginning of 1792, by various investigations.⁷⁴ "Eighteen thousand officers of every grade, elected by the constitutionalists, seventy-one department administrations out of eighty-two, most of the tribunals,⁷⁵ all traders and manufacturers, every chief and a large portion of the National Guard of Paris," in short, the élite of the nation, and among citizens generally, the great majority who lived from day to day were for him, and for the "Right" of the Assembly against the "Left". If internal trouble had not been complicated by external difficulties, there would have been a change in opinion, and this the King expected. In accepting the Constitution, he thought that its defects would be revealed in practical operation and that they would lead to a reform. In the mean time he scrupulously observed the Constitution, and, through interest as well as conscience, kept his oath to the letter. "The most faithful execution of the Constitution," he said to one of his ministers, "is the surest way to make the nation see the changes that ought to be made in it."⁷⁶ -- In other words, he counted on experience, and it is very probable that if there had been nothing to interfere with experience, his calculations would have finally chosen between the defenders of order and the instigators of disorder. It would have decided for the magistrates against the clubs, for the police against rioters, for the king against the mob. In one or two years more it would have learned that a restoration of the executive power was indispensable for securing the execution of the laws; that the chief of police, with his hands tied, could not do his duty; that it was undoubtedly wise to give him his orders, but that if he was to be of any use against knaves and fools, his hands should first be set free.

Effects of the war on the common people. -- Its alarms and fury. -- The second revolutionary outburst and its characteristics. -- Alliance of the Girondists with the mob. -- The red cap and pikes. -- Universal substitution of government by force for government by law.

Just the contrary with war; the aspect of things changes, and the alternative is the other way. It is no longer a choice between order and disorder, but between the new and the old regime, for, behind foreign opponents on the frontier, there stand the émigrés. The commotion is terrible, especially amongst the lower classes which mainly bore the whole weight of the old establishment; among the millions who live by the sweat of their brow, artisans, small farmers, métayers, day-laborers and soldiers, also the smugglers of salt and other articles, poachers, vagabonds, beggars and half-beggars, who, taxed, plundered, and harshly treated for centuries, have to endure, from father to son, poverty, oppression and disdain. They know through their own experience the difference between their late and their present condition. They have only to fall back on personal knowledge to revive in their imaginations the enormous royal, ecclesiastical, and seignorial taxes, the direct tax of eighty-one per cent., the bailiffs in charge, the seizures and the husbandry service, the inquisition of excise men, of inspectors of the salt tax, wine tax (rats de cave) and game-keepers, the ravages of wild birds and of pigeons, the extortions of the collector and his clerk, the delay and partiality in obtaining justice, the rashness and brutality of the police, the kicks and cuffs of the constabulary, the poor wretches gathered like heaps of dirt and filth, the promiscuousness, the over- crowding, the filth and the starvation of the prisons.⁷⁷ They have simply to open their eyes to see their immense deliverance; all direct or indirect taxes for the past two years legally abolished or practically suppressed, beer at two pennies a pot, wine at six, pigeons in their meat-safes, game on their turn-spits, the wood of the national forests in their lofts, the gendarmerie timid, the police absent, in many places the crops all theirs, the owner not daring to claim his share, the judge avoiding condemning them, the constable refusing to serve papers on them, privileges restored in their favor, the public authorities cringing to the crowds and yielding to their exactions, remaining quiet or unarmed in the face of their misdeeds, their outrages excused or tolerated, their superior good sense and deep feeling lauded in thousands of speeches, the jacket and the blouse considered as symbols of patriotism, and supremacy in the State claimed for the sans-culottes⁷⁸ in the name their merits and their virtues. -- And now the overthrow of all this is announced to them, a league against them of foreign kings, the emigrants in arms, an invasion imminent, the Croats and Pandours in the field, hordes of mercenaries and barbarians crowding down on them again to put them in chains. -- From the workshop to the cottage there rolls along a formidable outburst of anger, accompanied with national songs, denouncing the plots of tyrants and summoning the people to arms.⁷⁹ This is the second wave of the Revolution, fast swelling and roaring, less general than the first, since it bears along with it but little more than the lower class, but higher and much more destructive.

Not only, indeed, is the mass now launched forth coarse and crude, but a new sentiment animates it, the force of which is incalculable, that of plebeian pride, that of the poor man, the subject, who, suddenly erect after ages of debasement, relishes, far beyond his hopes and unstintedly, the delights of equality, independence, and dominion. "Fifteen millions white Negroes," says Mallet du Pan,⁸⁰ worse fed, more miserable than those of St. Domingo, like them rebelled and freed from all authority by their revolt, accustomed like them, through thirty months of license, to ruling over all that is left of their former masters, proud like them of the restoration of their caste and exulting in their horny hands. One may imagine their transports of rage on hearing the trumpet-blast which awakens them, showing them on the horizon the returning planters, bringing with them new whips and heavier manacles? -- Nothing is more distrustful than such a sentiment in such breasts -- quickly alarmed, ready to strike, ready for any act of violence, blindly credulous, headlong and easily impelled, not merely against real enemies on the outside, but at first against imaginary enemies on the inside,⁸¹ but also against the King, the ministers, the gentry, priests, parliamentarians, orthodox Catholics; against

all administrators and magistrates imprudent enough to have appealed to the law;

all manufacturers, merchants, and owners of property who condemn disorder;

the wealthy whose egotism keeps them at home;

all those who are well-off, well-bred and well-dressed.

They are all under suspicion because they have lost by the new regime, or because they have not adopted its ways. -- Such is the colossal brute which the Girondins introduce into the political arena.⁸² For six months they shake red flags before its eyes, goad it on, work it up into a rage and drive it forward by decrees and proclamations,

* against their adversaries and against its keepers,

* against the nobles and the clergy,

* against aristocrats inside France in complicity with those of Coblentz,

* against "the Austrian committee" the accomplice of Austria,

* against the King, whose caution they transform into treachery,

* against the whole government to which they impute the anarchy they excite, and the war of which they themselves are the instigators.⁸³

Thus over-excited and topsy-turvy, the proletariat require only arms and a rallying-point. The Girondins furnish both. Through a striking coincidence, one which shows that the plan was concerted,⁸⁴ they start three political engines at the same time. Just at the moment when, through their deliberate saber-rattling, they made war inevitable, they invented popular insignia and armed the poor. At the end of January, 1792, almost during one week, they announced their ultimatum to Austria using a fixed deadline, they adopted the red woolen cap and began the manufacture of pikes. -- It is evident that pikes are of no use in the open field against cannon and a regular army; accordingly the are intended for use in the interior and in towns. Let the national-guard who can pay for his uniform, and the active citizen whose three francs of direct tax gives him a privilege, own their guns; the stevedore, the market-porter, the lodger, the passive citizen, whose poverty excludes them from voting must have their pikes, and, in these insurrectionary times, a ballot is not worth a good pike wielded by brawny arms. -- The magistrate in his robes may issue any summons he pleases, but it will be rammed down his throat, and, lest he should be in doubt of this he is made to know it beforehand. "The Revolution began with pikes and pikes will finish it."⁸⁵ "Ah," say the regulars of the Tuileries gardens, "if the good patriots of the Champs de Mars only had had pikes like these the blue-coats (Lafayette's guards) would not have had such a good hand!" -- "They are to be used everywhere, wherever there are enemies of the people, to the Château, if any can be found there!" They will override the veto and make sure that the National Assembly will approve the good laws. To this purpose, the Faubourg St. Antoine volunteers its pikes, and, to mark the use made of them, it complains that "efforts are made to substitute an aristocracy of wealth for the omnipotence of inherited rank." It demands "severe measures against the rascally hypocrites who, with the Constitution in their hands, slaughter the people." It declares that "kings, ministers and a civil list will pass away, but that the rights of man, national sovereignty and pikes will not pass away," and, by order of the president, the National Assembly thanks the petitioners, "for the advice their zeal prompts them to give.

The leaders of the Assembly and the people armed with pikes unite against the rich, against Constitutionalists, against the government, and henceforth, the Jacobin extremists march side by side with the Girondins, both reconciled for the attack but reserved their right to disagree until after the victory.

"The object of the Girondists⁸⁶ is not a republic in name, but an actual republic through a reduction of the civil lists to five millions, through the curtailment of most of the royal prerogatives, through a change of dynasty of which the new head would be a sort of honorary president of the republic to which they would assign an executive council appointed by the Assembly, that is to say, by themselves." As to the Jacobin extremists we find no principle with them but "that of a rigorous, absolute application of the Rights of Man. With the aid of such a charter they aim at changing the laws and public officers every six months, at extending their leveling process to every constituted authority, to all legal pre-eminence and to property. The only regime they long for is the democracy of a contentious rabble. . . The vilest instruments, professional agitators, brigands, fanatics, every sort of wretch, the hardened and armed poverty-stricken, who, in wild disorder" march to the attack of property and to "universal pillage" in short, barbarians of town and country "who form their ordinary army and never leave it inactive one single day." -- Under their universal, concerted and growing usurpation the substance of power melts wholly away in the hand of the legal authorities; little by little, these are reduced to vain counterfeits, while from one end of France, to the other, long before the final collapse, the party, in the provinces as well as at Paris, substitutes, under the cry of public danger, a government of might for the government of law.

Provence in 1792. -- Early supremacy of the Jacobins in Marseilles. -- Composition of the party. -- The club and the municipality. -- Expulsion of the "Earnest" regiment.

Should you like to see the revolutionary tree when, for the first time, it came fully into leaf, it is in the department of the Bouches- du-Rhône you have to look. Nowhere else had it been so precocious, nowhere were local circumstances and native temperament so well adapted to enhance its growth. -- " A blistering sky, an excessive climate, an arid soil, rocks, . . . savage rivers, torrential or dry or overburdened," blinding dust, nerves upset by steady northern blasts or by the intermittent gusts of the sirocco. A sensual race choleric and impetuous, with no intellectual or moral ballast, in which the mixture of Celt and Latin has destroyed the humane suavity of the Celt and the serious earnestness of the Roman; "complete, tough, powerful, and restless men,"¹ and yet gay, spontaneous, eloquent, dupes of their own bombast, suddenly carried away by a flow of words and superficial enthusiasm. Their principal city numbering 120,000 souls, in which commercial and maritime risks foster innovating and adventurous spirits; in which the sight of suddenly- acquired fortunes expended on sensual enjoyments constantly undermines all stability of Character; in which politics, like speculation, is a lottery offering its prizes to audacity; besides all this, a free port and a rendezvous for lawless nomads, disreputable people, without steady trade,² scoundrels, and blackguards, who, like uprooted, decaying seaweed, drift from coast to coast around the entire circle of the Mediterranean sea; a veritable sink filled with the dregs of twenty corrupt and semi-barbarous civilizations, where the scum of crime cast forth from the prisons of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, indeed, of all Italy, of Spain, of the Archipelago, and of Barbary,3 accumulates and ferments.2 No wonder that, in such a time the reign of the mob should be established there sooner than elsewhere.³ -- After many an explosion, this reign is inaugurated August 17, 1790, by the removal of M. Lieutaud, a sort of bourgeois, moderate Lafayette, who commands the National Guard. Around him rally a majority of the population, all men "honest or not, who have anything to lose."⁴ After he is driven out, then proscribed, then imprisoned, they resign themselves, and Marseilles belongs to the low class, to 40,000 destitute and rogues led by the club.

The better to ensure their empire, the municipality, one month after the expulsion of M. Lieutaud, declared every citizen "active" who had any trade or profession⁵; the consequence is that vagabonds attend the meetings of the sections in contempt of constitutional law. The consequence, was that property-owners and commercial men withdrew, which was wise on their part, for the usual demagogic machinery is set in motion without delay. "Each section-assembly is composed of a dozen factious spirits, members of the club, who drive out honest people by displaying cudgels and bayonets. The deliberations are prepared beforehand at the club, in concert with the municipality, and woe to him who refuses to adopt them at the meeting! They go so far as to threaten citizens who wish to make any remarks with instant burial in the cellars under the churches."⁶ The argument proved irresistible: "the majority of honest people are so frightened and so timid" that not one of them dare attend these meetings, unless protected by public force. "More than 80,000 inhabitants do not sleep peacefully," while all the political rights are vested in "five or six hundred individuals," legally disqualified. Behind them marches the armed rabble, "the horde of brigands without a country,"⁷ always ready for plundering, murder, and hanging. In front of them march the local authorities, who, elected through their influence, carry on the administration under their guidance. Patrons and clients, members of the club and its satellites, they form a league which plays the part of a sovereign State, scarcely recognizing, even in words, the authority of the central government.⁸ The decree by which the National Assembly gives full power to the Commissioners to re- establish order is denounced as plébécide; these conscientious and cautious moderators are qualified as "dictators"; they are denounced in circular letters to all the municipalities of the department, and to all Jacobin clubs throughout the kingdom;⁹ the club is somewhat disposed to go to Aix to cut off their heads and send them in a trunk to the president of the National Assembly, with a threat that the same penalty awaits himself and all the deputies if they do not revoke their recent decrees. A few days after this, four sections draw up an act before a notary, stating the measures they had taken towards sending an army of 6,000 men from Marseilles to Aix, to get rid of the three intruders. The commissioners dare not enter Marseilles, where "gibbets are ready for them, and a price set on their heads." It is as much as they can do to rescue from the faction M. Lieutaud and his friends, who, accused of lése-nation, confined without a shadow of proof, treated like mad dogs, put in chains,¹⁰ shut up in privies and holes, and obliged to drink their own urine for lack of water, impelled by despair to the brink of suicide, barely escape murder a dozen times in the courtroom and in prison.¹¹ Against the decree of the National Assembly ordering their release, the municipality makes reclamations, contrives delays, resists, and finally stirs up its usual instruments. Just as the prisoners are about to be released a crowd of "armed persons without uniform or officer," constantly increased "by vagabonds and foreigners," gathers on the heights overlooking the Palais de Justice, and makes ready to fire on M. Lieutaud. Summoned to proclaim martial law, the municipality refuses, declaring that "the general detestation of the accused is too manifest"; it demands the return of the Swiss regiment to its barracks, and that the prisoners remain where they are; the only thing which it grants them is a secret permission to escape, as if they were guilty; they, accordingly, steal away clandestinely and in disguise.¹² -- The Swiss regiment, however, which prevents the magistrates from violating the law, must pay for its insolence, and, as it is incorruptible, they decide to drive it out of the town. For four months the municipality multiplies against it every kind of annoyance,¹³ and, on the 16th of October, 1791, the Jacobins provoke a row in the theater against its officers. The same night, outside the theater, four of these are attacked by armed bands; the post to which they retreat is nearly taken by assault; they are led to a prison for safety, and there they still remain five days afterwards, "although their innocence is admitted." Meanwhile, to ensure "public tranquility," the municipality has required the commander of the post to immediately replace the Swiss Guard with National Guards on all the military posts; the latter yields to force, while the useless regiment, insulted and threatened, has nothing to do but to pack off.¹⁴ This being done, the new municipality, still more Jacobin than the old one,¹⁵ separates Marseilles from France, erects the city into a marauding republican government, gets up expeditions, levies contributions, forms alliances, and undertakes an armed conquest of the department.

The town of Marseilles send an expedition to Aix. -- The regiment is disarmed. -- The Directory driven out. -- Pressure on the new Directory.

The first thing is to lay its hand on the district capital, Aix, where the Swiss regiment is stationed in garrison and where the superior authorities are installed. This operation is the more necessary inasmuch as the Directory of the department loudly commends the loyalty of the Swiss Guard and takes occasion to remind the Marseilles municipality of the respect due to the law. Such remonstrance is an insult, and the municipality, in a haughty tone, calls upon the Directory to avow or disavow its letter; "if you did not write it, it is a foul report which it is our duty to examine into, and if you did, it is a declaration of war made by you against Marseilles."¹⁶ The Directory, in polite terms and with great circumspection, affirms both its right and its utterance, and remarks that "the prorata list of taxes of Marseilles for 1791 is not yet reported;" that the municipality is much more concerned with saving the State than with paying its contribution and, in short, it maintains its censure. -- If it will not bend it must break, and on the 4th of February, 1792, the municipality sends Barbaroux, its secretary, to Paris, that he may mitigate the outrages they are preparing. During the night of the 25- 26, the drums beat the general alarm, and three or four thousand men gather and march to Aix with six pieces of cannon. As a precaution they pretend to have no leaders, no captains or lieutenants or even corporals; to quote them, all are equal, all volunteers, each being summoned by the other; in this fashion, as all are responsible, no one is.¹⁷ They reach Aix at eleven o'clock in the forenoon, find a gate open through the connivance of those in league with them among the populace of the town and its suburbs, and summon the municipality to surrender the sentinels. In the mean time their emissaries have announced in the neighboring villages that the town was menaced by the Swiss regiment; consequently four hundred men from Aubagne arrive in haste, while from hour to hour the National Guards from the surrounding villages likewise rush in. The streets are full of armed men; shouts arise and the tumult increases; the municipal body, in the universal panic, loses its wits. This body is afraid of a nocturnal fight "between troops of the line, citizens, National Guards and armed strangers, no one being able to recognize one another or know who is an enemy." It sends back a detachment of three hundred and fifty Swiss Guards, which the Directory had ordered to its support, and consigns the regiment to its quarters. -- At this the Directory takes to flight. Military sentinels of all kinds are disarmed while the Marseilles throng, turning its advantages to account, announces to the municipality at two o'clock in the morning that, "allow it or not " it is going to attack the barracks immediately; in fact, cannon are planted, a few shots are fired, a sentinel killed, and the hemmed-in regiment is compelled to evacuate the town, the men without their guns and the officers without their swords. Their arms are stolen, the people seize the suspected, the street-lamp is hauled down and the noose is made ready. Cayol, the flower-girl, is hung. The municipality, with great difficulty, saves one man who is already lifted by the rope two feet from the ground, and obtains for three others "a temporary refuge" in prison.

Henceforth there is no authority at the department headquarters, or rather it has changed hands. Another Directory, more pliable, is installed in the place of the fugitive Directory. Of the thirty-six administrators who form the Council only twelve are present at the election. Of the nine elected only six consent to sit, while often only three are found at its sessions, which three, to recruit their colleagues, are obliged to pay them.¹⁸ Hence, notwithstanding their position is the best in the department, they are worse treated and more unfortunate than their servants outside. The delegates of the club, with the municipal officers of Marseilles seated alongside of them, oblige them either to keep silent, or to utter what they dictate to them.¹⁹ "Our arms are tied," writes one of them, "we are wholly under the yoke" of these intruders. "We have twice in succession seen more than three hundred men, many of them with guns and pistols, enter the hall and threaten us with death if we refused them what they asked. We have seen infuriate motionnaires, nearly all belonging to Avignon, mount the desks of the Directory, harangue their comrades and excite them to rioting and crime. "You must decide between life or death," they exclaimed to us, "you have only a quarter of an hour to choose." "National guards have offered their sabers through the windows, left open on account of the extreme heat, to those around us and made signs to them to cut our throats." -- Thus fashioned, reduced and drilled, the Directory is simply an instrument in the hands of the Marseilles demagogues. Camoïn, Bertin and Rebecqui, the worst agitators and usurpers, rule there without control. Rebecqui and Bertin, appointed delegates in connection with matters in Arles, have themselves empowered to call for defensive troops; they immediately demand them for attack, to which the Directory vainly remonstrates; they declare to it that "not being under its inspection, it has no authority over them; being independent of it, they have no orders to receive from it nor to render to it any account of their conduct." So much the worse for the Directory on attempting to revoke their powers. Bertin informs its vice-president that, if it dares do this he will cut off his head. They reply to the Minister's observations with the utmost insolence.²⁰ They glory in the boldness of the stroke and prepare another, their march on Aix being only the first halt in the long-meditated campaign which involves the possession of Arles.

The Constitutionalists of Arles. -- The Marseilles expedition against Arles. -- Excesses committed by them in the town and its vicinity. -- Invasion of "Apt," the club and its volunteers.

No city, indeed, is more odious to them. -- For two years, led or pushed on by its mayor, M. d'Antonelle, it has marched along with them or been dragged along in their wake. D'Antonelle, an ultra- revolutionary, repeatedly visited and personally encouraged the bandits of Avignon. To supply them with cannon and ammunition he stripped the Tour St. Louis of its artillery, at the risk of abandoning the mouths of the Rhone to the Barbary pirates.²¹ In concert with his allies of the Comtat, the Marseilles club, and his henchmen from the neighboring boroughs, he rules in Arles "by terror." Three hundred men recruited in the vicinity of the Mint, artisans or sailors with strong arms and rough hands, serve him as satellites. On the 6th of June 1791, they drive away, on their own authority, the unsworn priests, who had taken refuge in the town.²² -- At this, however, the "property-owners and decent people," much more numerous and for a long time highly indignant, raise their heads; twelve hundred of them assemble in the church of Saint-Honorat, swore to maintain the constitution and public order,"²³ and then moved to the (Jacobin) club, where, in their quality of national guards and active citizens and in conformity with its by-laws, they were admitted en masse. At the same time, acting in concert with the municipality, they reorganize the National Guard and form new companies, the effect of which is to put an end to the Mint gang, thus depriving the faction of all its strength. Thenceforth, without violence or illegal acts, the majority of the club, as well as of the National Guard, consists of constitutional monarchists, the elections of November, 1791, giving to the partisans of order nearly all the administrative offices of the commune and of the district. M. Loys, a physician and a man of energy, is elected mayor in the place of M. d'Antonelle; he is known as able to suppress a riot, "holding martial law in one hand, and his saber in the other." -- This is too much; so Marseilles feel compelled to bring Arles under control "to atone for the disgrace of having founded it."²⁴ In this land of ancient cities political hostility is embittered with old municipal grudges, similar to those of Thebes against Platoee, of Rome against Veii, of Florence against Pisa. The Guelphs of Marseilles brooded over the one idea of crushing the Ghibellins of Arles. -- Already, in the electoral assembly of November, 1791, M. d'Antonelle, the president, had invited the communes of the department to take up arms against this anti-jacobin city.²⁵ Six hundred Marseilles volunteers set out on the instant, install themselves at Salon, seize the syndic-attorney of the hostile district, and refuse to give him up, this being an advance-guard of 4,000 men promised by the forty or fifty clubs of the party.²⁶ To arrest their operations requires the orders of the three commissioners, resolutions passed by the Directory still intact, royal proclamations, a decree of the Constituent Assembly, the firmness of the still loyal troops and the firmer stand taken by the Arlesians who, putting down an insurrection of the Mint band, had repaired their ramparts, cut away their bridges and mounted guard with their guns loaded.²⁷ But it is only a postponement. Now that the commissioners have gone, and the king's authority a phantom, now that the last loyal regiment is disarmed, the terrified Directory recast and obeying like a servant, with the Legislative Assembly allowing everywhere the oppression of the Constitutionalists by the Jacobins, a fresh Jacobin expedition may be started against the Constitutionalists with impunity. Accordingly, on the 23rd of March, 1792, the Marseilles army of 4,500 men sets out on its march with nineteen pieces of cannon.

In vain the commissioners of the neighboring departments, sent by the Minister, represent to them that Arles submits, that she has laid down her arms, and that the town is now garrisoned with troops of the line; -- the Marseilles army requires the withdrawal of this garrison. -- In vain the garrison departs. Rebecqui and his acolytes reply that "nothing will divert them from their enterprise; they cannot defer to anybody's decision but their own in relation to any precaution tending to ensure the safety of the southern departments." -- In vain the Minister renews his injunctions and counter-orders. The Directory replies with a flagrant falsehood, stating that it is ignorant of the affair and refuses to give the government any assistance. -- In vain M. de Wittgenstein, commander-in-chief in the south, offers his services to the Directory to repel the invaders. The Directory forbids him to take his troops into the territory of the department.²⁸ -- Meanwhile, on the 29th of March, the Marseilles army effects a breach with its cannon in the walls of defenseless Arles; its fortifications are demolished and a tax of 1,400,000 francs is levied on the owners of property. In contempt of the National Assembly's decree the Mint bandits, the longshoremen, the whole of the lowest class again take up their arms and lord it over the disarmed population. Although "the King's commissioner and most of the judges have fled, jury examinations are instituted against absentees," the juries consisting of the members of the Mint band.²⁹ The conquerors imprison, smite and slaughter as they please. Countless peaceable individuals are struck down and mauled, dragged to prison and many of them are mortally wounded. An old soldier, eighty years of age, retired to his country home three months earlier, dies after twenty days' confinement in a dungeon, from a blow received in the stomach by a rifle butt; women are flogged. "All citizens that with an interest in law and order," nearly five thousand families, have emigrated; their houses in town and in the country are pillaged, while in the surrounding boroughs, along the road leading from Arles to Marseilles, the villains forming the hard core of the Marseilles army, rove about and gorge themselves as in a vanquished country.³⁰

They eat and drink voraciously, force the closets, carry off linen and food, steal horses and valuables, smash the furniture, tear up books, and burn papers.³¹ All this is only the appropriate punishment of the aristocrats. Moreover, it is no more than right that patriots should be indemnified for their toil, and a few blows too many are not out of place in securing the rule of the right party. -- For example, on the false report of order being disturbed at Château-Renard, Bertin and Rebecqui send off a detachment of men, while the municipal body in uniform, followed by the National Guard, with music and flags, comes forth to meet and salute it. Without uttering a word of warning, the Marseilles troop falls upon the cortège, strikes down the flags, disarms the National Guard, tears the epaulettes off the officers' shoulders, drags the mayor to the ground by his scarf, pursues the counselors, sword in hand, puts the mayor and syndic-attorney in arrest, and, during the night, sacks four dwellings, the whole under the direction of three Jacobins of the place under indictment for recent crimes or misdemeanors. Henceforth at Château-Renard they will look twice before subjecting patriots to indictment.³² -- At Vélaux "the country house of the late seignior is sacked, and everything is carried away, even to the tiles and window-glass." A troop of two hundred men "overrun the village, levy contributions, and put all citizens who are well-off under bonds for considerable sums." Camoïn, the Marseille chief, one of the new department administrators, who is in the neighborhood, lays his hand on everything that is fit to be taken, and, a few days after this, 30,000 francs are found in his carpet-bag.-Taught by the example others follow and the commotion spreads. In every borough or petty town the club profits by these acts to satiate its ambition its greed, and its hatred. That of Apt appeals to its neighbors, whereupon 1,500 National Guards of Gordes, St. Saturnin, Gouls and Lacoste, with a thousand women and children armed with clubs and scythes, arrive one morning before the town. On being asked by whose orders they come in this fashion, they reply, "by the orders which their patriotism has given them." -- "The fanatics," or partisans of the sworn priests, "are the cause of their journey": they therefore "want lodgings at the expense of the fanatics only." The three day's occupation results for the latter and for the town in a cost of 20,000 livres.³³ They begin by breaking everything in the church of the Récollets, and wall up its doors. They then expel unsworn ecclesiastics from the town, and disarm their partisans. The club of Apt, which is the sole authority, remains in session three days: "the municipal bodies in the vicinity appear before it, apologize for themselves, protest their civism, and ask as a favor that no detachment be sent to their places. Individuals are sent for to be interrogated"; several are proscribed, among whom are administrators, members of the court, and the syndic-attorney. A number of citizens have fled; -- the town is purged, while the same purging is pursued in numbers of places in and out of the district.³⁴ It is, indeed, attractive business. It empties the purses of the ill-disposed, and fills the stomachs of patriots; it is agreeable to be well entertained, and especially at the expense of one's adversaries; the Jacobin is quite content to save the country through a round of feastings. Moreover, he has the satisfaction of playing king among his neighbors, and not only do they feed him for doing them this service, but, again, they pay him for it.³⁵ -- All this is enlivening, and the expedition, which is a "sabbath," ends in a carnival. Of the two Marseilles divisions, one, led back to Aix, sets down to "a grand patriotic feast," and then dances fandangoes, of which "the principal one is led off by the mayor and commandant";³⁶ the other makes its entry into Avignon the same day, with still greater pomp and jollity.

The Jacobins of Avignon. -- How they obtain recruits. -- Their robberies in the Comtat. -- The Avignon municipality in flight or in prison. -- Murder of Lécuyer and the Glacière massacre. -- Entry of the murderers, supported by their Marseilles allies. -- Jacobin dictatorship in Vaucluse and the Buches-du-Rhône.

Nowhere else in France was there another nest of brigands like it: not that a great misery might have produced a more savage uprising; on the contrary, the Comtat, before the Revolution, was a land of plenty. There was no taxation by the Pope; the taxes were very light, and were expended on the spot. "For one or two pennies, one here could have meat, bread, and wine."³⁷ But, under the mild and corrupt administration of the Italian legates, the country had become "the safe asylum of all the rogues in France, Italy, and Genoa, who by means of a trifling sum paid to the Pope's agents, obtained protection and immunity." Smugglers and receivers of stolen goods abounded here in order to break through the lines of the French customs. "Bands of robbers and assassins were formed, which the vigorous measures of the parliaments of Aix and Grenoble could not wholly extirpate. Idlers, libertines, professional gamblers,"³⁸ kept-cicisbeos, schemers, parasites, and adventurers, mingle with men with branded shoulders, the veterans "of vice and crime, "the scapegraces of the Toulon and Marseilles galleys." Ferocity here is hidden in debauchery, like a serpent hidden in its own slime, here all that is required is some chance event and this bad place will be transformed into a death trap.

The Jacobin leaders, Tournal, Rovère, the two Duprats, the two Mainvielles, and Lécuyer, readily obtain recruits in this sink. -- They begin, aided by the rabble of the town and of its suburbs, peasants enemies of the octroi, vagabonds opposed to order of any kind, porters and watermen armed with scythes, turnspits and clubs, by exciting seven or eight riots. Then they drive off the legate, force the Councils to resign, hang the chiefs of the National Guard and of the conservative party,³⁹ and take possession of the municipal offices. -- After this their band increases to the dimensions of an army, which, with license for its countersign and pillage for its pay, is the same as that of Tilly and Wallenstein, "a veritable roving Sodom, at which the ancient city would have stood aghast." Out of 3,000 men, only 200 belong in Avignon; the rest are composed of French deserters, smugglers, fugitives from justice, vagrant foreigners, marauders and criminals, who, scenting a prey, come from afar, and even from Paris;⁴⁰ along with them march the women belonging to them, still more base and bloodthirsty. In order to make it perfectly plain that with them murder and robbery are the order of the day, they massacred their first general, Patrix, guilty of having released a prisoner, and elected in his place an old highway tramp named Jourdan, condemned to death by the court at Valence, but who had escaped on the eve of his execution, and who bore the nickname of Coupe-tête, because he is said to have cut off the heads at Versailles of two of the King's guards.⁴¹ -- Under such a commander the troop increases until it forms a body of five or six thousand men, which stops people in the streets and forcibly enrolls them; they are called Mandrins, which is severe for Mandrin,⁴² because their war is not merely on public persons and property, as his was, but on the possessions, the proprieties, and the lives of private individuals. One detachment alone, at one time, extorts in Cavaillon 25,000 francs, in Baume 12,000, in Aubignon 15,000, in Pioline 4,800, while Caumont is taxed 2,000 francs a week. At Sarrians, where the mayor gives them the keys, they pillage houses from top to bottom, carry off their plunder in carts, set fire, violate and slay with all the refinements of torture of so many Hurons. An old lady of eighty, and a paralytic, is shot at arms length, and left weltering in her blood in the midst of the flames. A child five years of age is cut in two, its mother decapitated, and its sister mutilated; they cut off the ears of the curé, set them on his brow like a cockade, and then cut his throat, along with that of a pig, and tear out the two hearts and dance around them.⁴³ After this, for fifty days around Carpentras, to which they lay siege in vain, the unprovoked, cruel instincts of the chauffeurs manifested at a later date, the ancient cannibalistic desires which sometimes reappear in convicts, and the perverted and over-strained sensuality found in maniacs, have full play.

On beholding the monster it has nourished, Avignon, in alarm, utters cries of distress.⁴⁴ But the brute, which feels its strength, turns against its former abettors, shows its teeth, and exacts its daily food. Ruined or not, Avignon must furnish its quota. "In the electoral assembly, Mainvielle the younger, elected elector, although he is only twenty-two, draws two pistols from his belt and struts around with a threatening air."⁴⁵ Duprat, the president, the better to master his colleagues, proposes to them to leave Avignon and go to Sorgues, which they refuse to do; upon this he orders cannon to be brought, promises to pay those who will accompany him, drags along the timid, and denounces the rest before an upper national court, of which he himself has designated the members. Twenty of the electors thus denounced are condemned and proscribed; Duprat threatens to enter by force and have them executed on the spot, and, under his leadership, the army of Mandrins advances against Avignon. -- Its progress is arrested, and, for two months, restrained by the two mediating commissioners for France; they reduce its numbers, and it is on the point of being disbanded, when the brute again boldly seizes its prey, about to make its escape. On the 21st of August, Jourdan, with his herd of miscreants, obtains possession of the palace. The municipal body is driven out, the mayor escapes in disguise, Tissot, the secretary, is cut down, four municipal officers and forty other persons are thrown into prison, while a number of houses belonging to the fugitives and to priests are pillaged, and thus supply the bandits with their first financial returns.⁴⁶ -- Then begins the great fiscal operation which is going to fill their pockets. Five front men, chosen by Duprat and his associates, compose, with Lécuyer as secretary, a provisional municipal body, which, taxing the town 300,000 francs and suppressing the convents, offers the spoils of the churches for sale. The bells are taken down, and the hammers of the workmen engaged in breaking them to pieces are heard all day long. A strong-box full of plate, diamonds, and gold crosses, left with the director of the Mont-de-Piété, on deposit, is taken and carried off to the commune; a report is spread that the valuables pawned by the poor had been stolen by the municipality, and that those "robbers had already sent away eighteen trunks full of them." Upon this the women, exasperated at the bare walls of the churches, together with the laborers in want of work or bread, all the common class, become furious, assemble of their own accord in the church of the Cordeliers, summon Lécuyer to appear before them, drag him from the pulpit and massacre him.⁴⁷

This time there seems to be an end of the brigand party, for the entire town, the populace and the better class, are against them, while the peasants in the country shoot them down wherever they come across them. -- Terror, however, supplies the place of numbers, and, with the 350 hired killers bravos still left to them, the extreme Jacobins undertake to overcome a city of 30,000 souls. Mainvielle the elder, dragging along two cannon, arrives with a patrol, fires at random into the already semi-abandoned church, and kills two men. Duprat assembles about thirty of the towns-people, imprisoned by him on the 31st of August, and, in addition to these, about forty artisans belonging to the Catholic brotherhoods, porters, bakers, coopers, and day-laborers, two peasants, a beggar, a few women seized haphazard and on vague denunciations, one of them, "because she spoke ill of Madame Mainvielle." Jourdan supplies the executioners; the apothecary Mende, brother-in-law of Duprat, plies them with liquor, while a clerk of Tournal, the newsman, bids them "kill all, so that there shall be no witnesses left." Whereupon, at the reiterated orders of Mainvielle, Tournal, Duprat, and Jourdan, with a complications of hilarious lewdness,⁴⁸ the massacre develops itself on the 16th of October and following days, during sixty-six hours, the victims being a couple of priests, three children, an old man of eighty, thirteen women, two of whom are pregnant, in all, sixty-one persons, with their throats slit or knocked out and then cast one on top of each other into the Glacière hole, a mother on the body of her infant, a son on the body of his father, all finished off with rocks, the hole being filled up with stones and covered over with quicklime on account of the smell.⁴⁹ In the meantime about a hundred more, killed in the streets, are pitched into the Sorgues canal; five hundred families make their escape. The ousted bandits return in a body, while the assassins who are at the head of them, enthroned by murder, organize for the benefit of their new band a legal system of brigandage, against which nobody defends himself.⁵⁰

These are the friends of the Jacobins of Arles and Marseilles, the respectable men whom M. d'Antonelle has come to address in the cathedral at Avignon.⁵¹ These are the pure patriots, who, with their hands in the till and their feet in gore, caught in the act by a French army, the mask torn off through a scrupulous investigation, universally condemned by the emancipated electors, also by the deliberate verdict of the new mediating commissioners,⁵² are included in the amnesty proclaimed by the Legislative Assembly a month before their last crime. -- But the sovereigns of the Bouches-du-Rhône do not regard the release of their friends and allies as a pardon: something more than pardon and forgetfulness must be awarded to the murderers of the Glacière. On the 29th of April, 1792, Rebecqui and Bertin, the vanquishers of Arles, enter Avignon⁵³ along with a cortége, at the head of which are from thirty to forty of the principal murderers whom the Legislative Assembly itself had ordered to be recommitted to prison, Duprat, Mainvielle, Toumal, Mende, then Jourdan in the uniform of a commanding general crowned with laurel and seated on a white horse, and, lastly, the dames Duprat, Mainvielle and Tournal, in dashing style, standing on a sort of triumphal chariot; during the procession the cry is heard, "The Glacière will be full this time! " -- On their approach the public functionaries fly; twelve hundred persons abandon the town. Forthwith each terrorist, under the protection of the Marseilles bayonets, resumes his office, like a man at the head of his household. Raphel, the former judge, along with his clerk, both with warrants of arrest against them, publicly officiate, while the relatives of the poor victims slain on the 16th of October, and the witnesses that appeared on the trial, are threatened in the streets; one of them is killed, and Jourdan, king of the department for an entire year, begins over again on a grand scale, at the head of the National Guard, and afterwards of the police body, the same performance which, on a small scale, he pursued under the ancient régime, when, with a dozen "armed and mounted" brigands, he traversed the highways, forced open lonely houses at night, and, in one château alone, stole 24,000 francs.

The other departments. -- Uniform process of the Jacobin conquest. -- Preconceived formation of a Jacobin State.

The Jacobin conquest takes place like this: already in during April, 1792, through acts of violence almost equal to those we have just described, it spreads over more than twenty departments and, to a smaller degree, over the other sixty.⁵⁴ The composition of the parties is the same everywhere. On one side are the irresponsible of all conditions,

"squanderers who, having consumed their own inheritance, cannot tolerate that of another, men without property to whom disorder is a door open to wealth and public office, the envious, the ungrateful whose obligations to their benefactors the revolution cancels, the hot-headed, all those enthusiastic innovators who preach reason with a dagger in their hand, the poor, the brutal and the wretched of the lower class who, possessed by one leading anarchical idea, one example of immunity, with the law dumb and the sword in the scabbard, are stimulated to dare all things

On the other side are the steady-going, peaceable class, minding their own business, upper and lower middle class in mind and spirit,

"weakened by being used to security and wealth, surprised at any unforeseen disturbance and trying to find their way, isolated from each other by diversity of interests, opposing only tact and caution to persevering audacity in defiance of legitimate means, unable either to make up their mind or to remain inactive, perplexed over sacrifices just at the time when the enemy is going to render it impossible to make any in the future, in a word, bringing weakness and egoism to bear against the liberated passions, great poverty and hardened immorality."⁵⁵

The issue of the conflict is everywhere the same. In each town or canton an aggressive squad of unscrupulous fanatics and resolute adventurers imposes its rule over a sheep-like majority which, accustomed to the regularity of an old civilization, dares neither disturb order for the sake of putting and end to disorder, or get together a mob to put down another mob. Everywhere the Jacobin principle is the same.

"Your system," says one of the department Directories to them,⁵⁶ "is to act imperturbably on all occasions, even after a constitution is established, and the limitations to power are fixed, as if the empire would always be in a state of insurrection, as if you were granted a dictatorship essential for the city's salvation, as if you were given such full power in the name of public safety."

Everywhere are Jacobin tactics the same. At the outset they assume to have a monopoly of patriotism and, through the brutal destruction of other associations, they are the only visible organ of public opinion. Their voice, accordingly, seems to be the voice of the people; their control is established on that of the legal authorities; they have taken the lead through persistent and irresistible misdeeds; their crimes are consecrated by exemption from punishment.

"Among officials and agents, good or bad, constituted or not constituted, that alone governs which is inviolable. Now the club, for a long time, has been too much accustomed to domineering, to annoying, to persecuting, to wreaking vengeance, for any local administration to regard it in any other light than as inviolable."⁵⁷

They accordingly govern and their indirect influence is promptly transformed into direct authority. -- Voting alone, or almost alone, in the primary meetings, which are deserted or under constraint, the Jacobins easily choose the municipal body and the officers of the National Guard.⁵⁸ After this, through the mayor, who is their tool or their accomplice, they have the legal right to launch or arrest the entire armed force and they avail themselves of it. -- Two obstacles still stand in their way. One the one hand, however conciliatory or timid the Directory of the district or department may be, elected as it is by electors of the second degree, it usually contains a fair proportion of well-informed men, comfortably off, interested in keeping order, and less inclined than the municipality to put up with gross violations of the law. Consequently the Jacobins denounce it to the National Assembly as an unpatriotic and anti-revolutionary center of "bourgeois aristocracy." Sometimes, as at Brest,⁵⁹ they shamefully disobey orders which are perfectly legal and proper, often repeated and strictly formal; afterward, still more shamefully, they demand of the Minister if, "placed in the cruel alternative of giving offense to the hierarchy of powers, or of leaving the commonwealth in danger, they ought to hesitate." Sometimes, as at Arras, they impose themselves illegally on the Directory in session and browbeat it so insolently as to make it a point of honor with the latter to solicit its own suspension.⁶⁰ Sometimes, as a Figeac, they summon an administrator to their bar, keep him standing three-quarters of an hour, seize his papers and oblige him, for fear of something worse, to leave the town.⁶¹ Sometimes, as at Auch, they invade the Directory's chambers, seize the administrators by the throat, pound them with their fists and clubs, drag the president by the hair, and, after a good deal of trouble, grant him his life.⁶² -- On the other hand, the gendarmerie and the troops brought for the suppression of riots, are always in the way of those who stir up the rioters. Consequently, they expel, corrupt and, especially purify the gendarmerie together with the troops. At Cahors they drive out a sergeant of the gendarmerie, "alleging that he keeps company with none but aristocrats."⁶³ At Toulouse, without mentioning the lieutenant- colonel, whose life they threaten by anonymous letters and oblige to leave the town, they transfer the whole corps to another district under the pretense that "its principles are adverse to the Constitution."⁶⁴ At Auch, and at Rennes, through the insubordination which they provoke among the men, they exhort resignations from their officers. At Perpignan, by means of a riot which they foment, they seize, beat and drag to prison, the commandant and staff whom they accuse "of wanting to bombard the town with five pounds of powder."⁶⁵- Meanwhile, through the jacquerie, which they let loose from the Dordogne to Aveyron, from Cantal to the Pyrenees and the Var, under the pretence of punishing the relatives of émigrés and the abettors of unsworn priests, they create an army of their own made up of robbers and the destitute who, in anticipation of the exploits of the coming revolutionary army, freely kill, burn, pillage, hold to ransom and prey at large on the defenseless flock of proprietors of every class and degree.⁶⁶

In this operation each club has its neighbors for allies, offering to them or receiving from them offers of men and money. That of Caen tenders its assistance to the Bayeux association for expelling unsworn priests, and to help the patriots of the place "to rid themselves of the tyranny of their administrators."⁶⁷ That of Besançon declares the three administrative bodies of Strasbourg "unworthy of the confidence with which they have been honored," and openly enters into a league with all the clubs of the Upper and Lower Rhine, to set free a Jacobin arrested as a fomenter of insurrections.⁶⁸ Those of the Puy-de-Dôme and neighboring departments depute to and establish at Clermont a central club of direction and propaganda.⁶⁹ Those of the Bouches-du-Rhône treat with the commissioners of the departments of Drôme, Gard, and Hérault, to watch the Spanish frontier, and send delegates of their own to see the state of the fortifications of Figuières.⁷⁰ -- There is no recourse to the criminal tribunals. In forty departments, these are not yet installed, in the forty-three others, they are cowed, silent, or lack money and men to enforce their decisions.⁷¹

Such is the foundation of the Jacobin State, a confederation of twelve hundred oligarchies, which maneuver their proletariat clients in obedience to the word of command dispatched from Paris. It is a complete, organized, active State, with its central government, its active force, its official journal, its regular correspondence, its declared policy, its established authority, and its representative and local agents; the latter are actual administrators alongside of administrations which are abolished, or athwart administrations which are brought under subjection. -- In vain do the latest ministers, good clerks and honest men, try to fulfill their duties; their injunctions and remonstrances are only so much waste paper.⁷² They resign in despair, declaring that,

"in this overthrow of all order, . . . in the present weakness of the public forces, and in the degradation of the constituted authorities, . . . it is impossible for them to maintain the life and energy of the vast body, the members of which are paralyzed." --

When the roots of a tree are laid bare, it is easy to cut it down; now that the Jacobins have severed them, a push on the trunk suffices to bring the tree to the ground.

Pressure of the Assembly on the King. -- His veto rendered void or eluded. -- His ministers insulted and driven away. -- The usurpations of his Girondist ministry. -- He removes them. -- Riots being prepared.

PREVIOUS to this the tree was so shaken as to be already tottering at its base. -- Reduced as the King's prerogative is, the Jacobins still continue to contest it, depriving him of even its shadow. At the opening session they refuse to him the titles of Sire and Majesty; to them he is not, in the sense of the constitution, a hereditary representative of the French people, but "a high functionary," that is to say, a mere employee, fortunate enough to sit in an equally good chair alongside of the president of the Assembly, whom they style "president of the nation."¹ The Assembly, in their eyes, is sole sovereign, "while the other powers," says Condorcet, "can act legitimately only when specially authorized by a positive law;² the Assembly may do anything that is not formally prohibited to it by the law," 'in other words, interpret the constitution, then change it, take it to pieces, and do away with it. Consequently, in defiance of the constitution, it takes upon itself the initiation of war, and, on rare occasions, on the King using his veto, it sets this aside, or allows it to be set aside.³ In vain he rejects, as he has a legal right to do, the decrees which sanction the persecution of unsworn ecclesiastics, which confiscate the property of the émigrés, and which establish a camp around Paris. At the suggestion of the Jacobin deputies,⁴ the unsworn ecclesiastics are interned, expelled, or imprisoned by the municipalities and Directories; the estates and mansions of the émigrés and of their relatives are abandoned without resistance to the jacqueries; the camp around Paris is replaced by the summoning of the Federates to Paris. In short, the monarch's sanction is eluded or dispensed with. -- As to his ministers, "they are merely clerks of the Legislative Body decked with a royal leash."⁵ In full session they are maltreated, reviled, grossly insulted, not merely as lackeys of bad character, but as known criminals. They are interrogated at the bar of the house, forbidden to leave Paris before their accounts are examined; their papers are overhauled; their most guarded expressions and most meritorious acts are held to be criminal; denunciations against them are provoked; their subordinates are incited to rebel against them;⁶ committees to watch them and calumniate them are appointed; the perspective of a scaffold is placed before them in every relation, acts or threats of accusation being passed against them, as well as against their agents, on the shallowest pretexts, accompanied with such miserable quibbling,⁷ and such an evident falsification of facts and texts that the Assembly, forced by the evidence, twice reverses its hasty decision, and declares those innocent whom it had condemned the evening before.⁸ Nothing is of any avail, neither their strict fulfillment of the law, their submission to the committees of the Assembly, nor their humble attitude before the Assembly itself; "they are careful now to treat it politely and avoid the galleys."⁹ -- But this does not suffice. They must become Jacobins; otherwise the high court of Orleans will be for them as for M. Delessart, the ante-room to the prison and the guillotine. "Terror and dismay," says Vergniaud, pointing with his finger to the Tuileries, "have often issued in the name of despotism in ancient times from that famous palace; let them to-day go back to it in the name of law."¹⁰

Even with a Jacobin Minister, terror and dismay are permanent. Roland, Clavières, and Servan not only do not shield the King, but they give him up, and, under their patronage and with their connivance, he is more victimized, more harassed, and more vilified than ever before. Their partisans in the Assembly take turns in slandering him, while Isnard proposes against him a most insolent address.¹¹ Shouts of death are uttered in front of his palace. An abbé or soldier is unmercifully beaten and dragged into the Tuileries basin. One of the gunners of the Guard reviles the queen like a fish woman, and exclaims to her, "How glad I should be to clap your head on the end of my bayonet!"¹² They supposed that the King is brought to heel under this double pressure of the Legislative Body and the street; they rely on his accustomed docility, or at least, on his proven lethargy; they think that they have converted him into what Condorcet once demanded, a signature machine.¹³ Consequently, without notifying him, just as if the throne were vacant, Servan, on his own authority, proposes to the Assembly the camp outside Paris.¹⁴ Roland, for his part, reads to him at a full meeting of the council an arrogant, pedagogical remonstrance, scrutinizing his sentiments, informing him of his duties, calling upon him to accept the new "religion," to sanction the decree against unsworn ecclesiastics, that is to say, to condemn to beggary, imprisonment, and transportation¹⁵ 70,000 priests and nuns guilty of orthodoxy, and authorize the camp around Paris, which means, to put his throne, his person, and his family at the mercy of 20,000 madmen, chosen by the clubs and other assemblages expressly to do him harm;¹⁶ in short, to discard at once his conscience and his common sense. -- Strange enough, the royal will this time remains staunch; not only does the King refuse, but he dismisses his ministers. So much the worse for him, for sign he must, cost what it will; if he insists on remaining athwart their path, they will march over him. -- Not because he is dangerous, and thinks of abandoning his legal immobility. Up to the 10th of August, through a dread of action, and not to kindle a civil war, he rejects all plans leading to an open rupture. Up to the very last day he resigns himself even when his personal safety and that of his family is at stake, to constitutional law and public common sense. Before dismissing Roland and Servan, he desires to furnish some striking proof of his pacific intentions by sanctioning the dissolution of his guard and disarming himself not only for attack but for defense; henceforth he sits at home and awaits the insurrection with which he is daily menaced; he resigns himself to everything, except drawing his sword; his attitude is that of a Christian in the amphitheatre.¹⁷ -- The proposition of a camp outside Paris, however, draws out a protest from 8,000 Paris National Guards. Lafayette denounces to the Assembly the usurpations of the Jacobins; the faction sees that its reign is threatened by this reawakening and union of the friends of order. A blow must be struck. This has been in preparation for a month past, and to renew the days of October 5th and 6th, the materials are not lacking.

The floating and poor population of Paris. -- Disposition of the workers. -- Effect of poverty and want of work. -- Effect of Jacobin preaching. -- The revolutionary army. -- Quality of its recruits -- Its first review. -- Its actual effective force.

Paris always has its interloping, floating population. A hundred thousand of the needy, one-third of these from the departments, "beggars by race," those whom Rétif de la Bretonne had already seen pass his door, Rue de Bièvre, on the 13th of July, 1789, on their way to join their fellows on the suburb of St. Antoine,¹⁸ along with them "those frightful raftsmen," pilots and dock-hands, born and brought up in the forests of the Nièvre and the Yonne, veritable savages accustomed to wielding the pick and the ax, behaving like cannibals when the opportunity offers,¹⁹ and who will be found foremost in the ranks when the September days come. Alongside these stride their female companions "barge-women who, embittered by toil, live for the moment only," and who, three months earlier, pillaged the grocer-shops.²⁰ All this "is a frightful crowd which, every time it stirs, seems to declare that the last day of the rich and well-to-do has come; tomorrow it is our turn, to-morrow we shall sleep on eiderdown." -- Still more alarming is the attitude of the steady workmen, especially in the suburbs. And first of all, if bread is not as expensive as on the 5th of October, the misery is worse. The production of articles of luxury has been at a standstill for three years, and the unemployed artisan has consumed his small savings. Since the ruin of St. Domingo and the pillaging of grocers' shops colonial products are dear; the carpenter, the mason, the locksmith, the market-porter, no longer has his early cup of coffee,²¹ while they grumble every morning at the thought of their patriotism being rewarded by an increase of deprivation.

But more than all this they are now Jacobins, and after nearly three years of preaching, the dogma of popular sovereignty has taken deep root in their empty brains. "In these groups," writes a police commissioner, "the Constitution is held to be useless and the people alone are the law. The citizens of Paris on the public square think themselves the people, populus, what we call the universality of citizens."²² -- It is of no use to tell them that, alongside of Paris, there is a France. Danton has shown them that the capital " is composed of citizens belonging one way or another to the eighty-three departments; that is has a better chance than any other place to appreciate ministerial conduct; that it is the first sentinel of the nation," which makes them confident of being right.²³ -- It is of no use to tell them that there are better-informed and more competent authorities than themselves. Robespierre assures them that "in the matter of genius and public-spiritedness the people are infallible, whilst every one else is subject to mistakes,"²⁴ and here they are sure of their capacity. -- In their own eyes they are the legitimate, competent authorities for all France, and, during three years, the sole theme their courtiers of the press, tribune, and club, vie with each other in repeating to them, is the expression of the Duc de Villeroy to Louis XIV. when a child: "Look my master, behold this great kingdom! It is all for you, it belongs to you, you are its master!" -- Undoubtedly, to swallow and digest such gross irony people must be half-fools or half-brutes; but it is exactly their capacity for self-deception which makes them different from the sensible or passive crowd and casts them into a band whose ascendancy is irresistible. Convinced that a street mob is entitled to absolute rule and that the nation expresses its sovereignty through its gatherings, they alone assemble the street mobs, they alone, by virtue of their conceit and lack of judgment, believe themselves kings .

Such is the new power which, in the early months of the year 1792, starts up alongside of the legal powers. It is not foreseen by the Constitution; nevertheless it exists and declares itself; it is visible and its recruits can be counted.²⁵ On the 29th of April, with the Assembly consenting, and contrary to the law, three battalions from the suburb of St. Antoine, about 1500 men,²⁶ march in three columns into the hall, one of which is composed of fusiliers and the other two of pikemen, "their pikes being from eight to ten feet long," of formidable aspect and of all sorts, "pikes with laurel leaves, pikes with clover leaves, pikes à carlet, pikes with turn- spits, pikes with hearts, pikes with serpents tongues, pikes with forks, pikes with daggers, pikes with three prongs, pikes with battle- axes, pikes with claws, pikes with sickles, lance-pikes covered with iron prongs." On the other side of the Seine three battalions from the suburb of St. Marcel are composed and armed in the same fashion. This constitutes a kernel of 3,000 more in other quarters of Paris. Add to these in each of the sixty battalions of the National guard the gunners, almost all of them blacksmiths, locksmiths and horse-shoers, also the majority of the gendarmes, old soldiers discharged for insubordination and naturally inclined to rioting, in all an army of about 9,000 men, not counting the usual accompaniment of vagabonds and mere bandits; ignorant and eager, but men who do their work, well armed, formed into companies, ready to march and ready to strike. Alongside of the talking authorities we have the veritable force that acts, for it is the only one which does act. As formerly the praetorian guard of the Caesars in Rome, or the Turkish guards of the Caliphs of Baghdad, it is henceforth master of the capital, and through the capital, of the Nation.

Its leaders. -- Their committee. -. Methods for arousing the crowd.

As the troops are so are their leaders. Bulls must have drovers to conduct them, one degree superior to the brute but only one degree, dressed, talking and acting in accordance with his occupation, without dislikes or scruples, naturally or willfully hardened, fertile in jockeying and in the expedients of the slaughterhouse, themselves belonging to the people or pretending to belong to them. Santerre is a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine, commander of the battalion of " Enfants Trouvés," tall, stout and ostentatious, with stentorian lungs, shaking the hand of everybody he meets in the street, and when at home treating everybody to a drink paid for by the Duke of Orleans. Legendre is a choleric butcher, who even in the Convention maintains his butchering traits. There are three or four foreign adventurers, experienced in all kinds of deadly operations, using the saber or the bayonet without warning people to get out of the way. Rotonde, the first one, is an Italian, a teacher of English and professional rioter, who, convicted of murder and robbery, is to end his days in Piedmont on the gallows. The second, Lazowski, is a Pole, a former dandy, a conceited fop, who, with Slave facility, becomes the barest of naked sans-culottes; former enjoying a sinecure, then suddenly turned out in the street, and shouting in the clubs against his protectors who he sees put down; he is elected captain of the gunners of the battalion St. Marcel, and is to be one of the September slaughterers. His drawing-room temperament, however, is not rigorous enough for the part he plays in the streets, and at the end of a year he is to die, consumed by a fever and by brandy. The third is another chief slaughterer at the September massacres. Fournier, known as the American, a former planter, who has brought with him from St. Domingo a contempt for human life; "with his livid and sinister countenance, his mustache, his triple belt of pistols, his coarse language, his oaths, he looks like a pirate." By their side we encounter a little hump-backed lawyer named Cuirette-Verrières, an unceasing speaker, who, on the 6th of October, 1789, paraded the city on a large white horse and afterwards pleaded for Marat, which two qualifications with his Punch figure, fully establish him in the popular imagination; the rugged guys, moreover, who hold nocturnal meetings at Santerre's needed a writer and he probably met their requirements. -- This secret society can count on other faithfuls. "Brière, wine-dealer, Nicolas, a sapper in the 'Enfants Trouvés' battalion, Gonor, claiming to be one of the victors of the Bastille,"²⁷ Rossignol, an old soldier and afterwards a journeyman-jeweler, who, after presiding at the massacres of La Force, is to become an improvised general and display his incapacity, debauchery, and thievery throughout La Vendée. "There are yet more of them," Huguenin undoubtedly, a ruined ex-lawyer, afterwards carabineer, then a deserter, next a barrier-clerk, now serving as spokesman for the Faubourg St. Honoré and finally president of the September commune; there was also, doubtless, St. Huruge alias Père Adam, the great barker of the Palais-Royal, a marquis fallen into the gutter, drinking with and dressing like a common porter, always flourishing an enormous club and followed by the riffraff.²⁸ -- These are all the leaders. The Jacobins of the municipality and of the Assembly confine their support of the enterprise to conniving at it and to giving it their encouragement.²⁹ It is better for the insurrection to seem spontaneous. Through caution or shyness the Girondins, Pétion, Manual and Danton himself, keep in the background -- - there is not reason for their coming forward. -- The rest, affiliated with the people and lost in the crowd, are better qualified to fabricate the story which their flock will like. This tale, adapted to the crowd's intellectual limits, form and activity, is both simple and somber, such as children like, or rather a melodrama taken from an alien stage in which the good appear on one side, and the wicked on the other with an ogre or tyrant in the center, some infamous traitor who is sure to be unmasked at the end of the piece and punished according to his deserts, the whole grandiloquent terms and, as a finale, winding up with a grand chorus. In the raw brain of an over- excited workman politics find their way only in the shape of rough- hewn, highly-colored imagery, such as is furnished by the Marseillaise, the Carmagnole, and the Ça ira. The requisite motto is adapted to his use; through this misshapen magnifying glass the most gracious figure appears under a diabolical aspect. Louis XVI. is represented here "as a monster using his power and treasure to oppose the regeneration of the French. A new Charles IX., he desires to bring on France death and desolation. Be gone, cruel man, your crimes must end! Damiens was less guilty than thou art! He was punished with the most horrible torture for having tried to rid France of a monster, while you, attempting twenty-five million times more, are allowed full immunity!³⁰ Let us trample under our feet this simulacra of royalty ! Tremble tyrants, Scoevolas are still amongst you!"

All this is pronounced, declaimed or rather shouted, publicly, in full daylight, under the King's windows, by stump-speakers mounted on chairs, while similar provocations daily flow from the committee installed in Santerre's establishment, now in the shape of displays posted in the faubourgs, now in that of petitions circulated in the clubs and sections, now through motions which are gotten up "among the groups in the Tuileries, in the Palais-Royal, in the Place de Grève and especially on the Place de la Bastille." After the 2nd of June the leaders founded a new club in the church of the "Enfants Trouvés" that they might have their special laboratory and thus do their work on the spot.³¹ Like Plato's demagogues, they understand their business. They have discovered the cries which make the popular animal take note, what offense offends him, what charm attracts him, and on what road he should be made to follow. Once drawn in and under way, he will march blindly on, borne along by his own involuntary inspiration and crushing with his mass all that he encounters on his path.

The 20th of June. -- The programme. -- The muster. -- The procession before the Assembly. -- Irruption into the Château. -- The King in the presence of the people.

The bait has been carefully chosen and is well presented. It takes the form of a celebration of the anniversary of the oath of the Tennis- court. A tree of Liberty will be planted on the terrace of the Feuillants and "petitions relating to circumstances" will be presented in the Assembly and then to the King. As a precaution, and to impose on the ill-disposed, the petitioners provide themselves with arms and line the approaches.³² -- A popular procession is an attractive thing, and there are so many workers who do not know what to do with their empty day! And, again, it is so pleasant to appear in a patriotic opera while many, and especially women and children, want very much to see Monsieur and Madame Veto. The people from the surrounding suburbs are invited,³³ the homeless prowlers and beggars will certainly join the party, while the numerous body of Parisian loafers, the loungers that join every spectacle can be relied on, and the curious who, even in our time, gather by hundreds along the quays, following a dog that has chanced to tumble into the river. All this forms a body which, without thinking, will follow its head.

At five o'clock in the morning on the 20th of June groups are already formed in the faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marcel, consisting of National Guards, pikemen, gunners with their cannon, persons armed with sabers or clubs, and women and children. -- A notice, indeed, just posted on the walls, prohibits any assemblage, and the municipal officers appear in their scarves and command or entreat the crowd not to break the law.³⁴ But, in a working-class brain, ideas are as tenacious as they are short-lived. People count on a civic procession and get up early in the morning to attend to it; the cannon have been hitched up, the maypole tree is put on wheels and all is ready for the ceremony, everybody takes a holiday and none are disposed to return home. Besides, they have only good intentions. They know the law as well as the city officials; they are "armed solely to have it observed and respected." Finally, other armed petitioners have already filed along before the National Assembly, and, as one is as good as another, "the law being equal for all," others must be admitted as well. In any event they, too, will ask permission of the National Assembly and they go expressly. This is the last and the best argument of all, and to prove to the city officials that they have no desire to engage in a riot, they request them to join the procession and march along with them.

Meanwhile, time passes. In a crowd irritated by delay, the most impatient, the rudest, those most inclined to commit violence, always lead the rest. -- At the head-quarters of the Val-de-Grâce³⁵ the pikemen seize the cannon and drag them along; the National Guards let things take their course; Saint-Prix and Leclerc, the officers in command, threatened with death, have nothing to do but to yield with a protest. -- There is the same state of things in the Montreuil section; the resistance of four out of six of the battalion officers merely served to give full power to the instigator of the insurrection, and henceforth Santerre becomes the sole leader of the assembled crowd. About half-past eleven he leaves his brewery, and, followed by cannon, the flag, and the truck which bears the poplar tree, he places himself at the head of the procession "consisting of about fifteen hundred persons including the bystanders."³⁶ Like a snowball, however, the troop grows as it marches along until, on reaching the National Assembly, Santerre has behind him from seven to eight thousand persons.³⁷ Guadet and Vergniaud move that the petitioners be introduced; their spokesman, Huguenin, in a bombastic and threatening address, denounces the ministry, the King, the accused at Orleans, the deputies of the "Right," demands "blood," and informs the Assembly that the people "resolute" is ready to take the law in their own hands.³⁸ Then, with drums beating and bands playing, the crowd defiles for more than an hour through the chamber under the eyes of Santerre and Saint-Huruge: here and there a few files of the National Guard pass mingled with the throng and lost in "the moving forest of pikes"; all the rest is pure rabble, "hideous faces,"³⁹ says a deputy, on which poverty and loose living have left their marks, ragamuffins, men "without coats," in their shirt-sleeves, armed in all sorts of ways, with chisels and shoe-knives fastened on sticks, one with a saw on a pole ten feet long, women and children, some of them brandishing a saber.⁴⁰ In the middle of this procession, an old pair of breeches ^culottes borne on a pike with this motto: Vivent les Sans-Culottes! and, on a pitch-fork, the heart of a calf with this inscription: Coeur d'aristocrate, both significant emblems of the grim humor the imaginations of rag-dealers or butchers might come up with for a political carnival. -- This, indeed, it is, they have been drinking and many are drunk.⁴¹ A parade is not enough, they want also to amuse themselves: traversing the hall they sing ça ira and dance in the intervals. They at the same time show their civism by shouting Vive les patriotes! A bas le Veto! They fraternise, as they pass along, with the good deputies of the "Left"; they jeer those of the "Right" and shake their fists at them; one of these, known by his tall stature, is told that his business will be settled for him the first opportunity.⁴² Thus do they flaunt their collaborators to the Assembly, everyone prepared and willing to act, even against the Assembly itself. -- And yet, with the exception of an iron-railing pushed in by the crowd and an irruption on to the terrace of the "Feuillants," no act of violence was committed. The Paris population, except when in a rage, is rather voluble and curious than ferocious; besides, thus far, no one had offered any resistance. The crowd is now sated with shouting and parading; many of them yawn with boredom and weariness;⁴³ at four o'clock they have stood on their legs for ten or twelve hours. The human stream issuing from the Assembly and emptying itself into the Carrousel remains stagnant there and seems ready to return to its usual channels. -- This is not what the leaders had intended. Santerre, on arriving with Saint-Huruge, cries out to his men, "Why didn't you enter the château? You must go in -- that is what we came here for."⁴⁴ A lieutenant of the Val-de-Grâce gunners shouts: "We have forced open the Carrousel, we must force open the château too! This is the first time the Val-de-Grâce gunners march -- they are not j.... f.... Come, follow me, my men, on to the enemy!⁴⁵ -- "Meanwhile, outside the gate, some of the municipal officers selected by Pétion amongst the most revolutionary members of the council, overcome resistance by their speeches and commands. 'After all," says one of them, named Mouchet, "the right of petition is sacred." -- " Open the gate!" shout Sergent and Boucher-René, "nobody has a right to shut it. Every citizen has a right to go through it!"⁴⁶ A gunner raises the latch, the gate opens and the court fills in the winkling of an eye;⁴⁷ the crowd rushes under the archway and up the grand stairway with such impetuosity that a cannon borne along by hand reaches the third room on the first story before it stops. The doors crack under the blows of axes and, in the large hall of the Oeil de Boeuf, the multitude find themselves face to face with the King.

In such circumstances the representatives of public authority, the directories, the municipalities, the military chiefs, and, on the 6th of October, the King himself, have all thus far yielded; they have either yielded or perished. Santerre, certain of the issue, preferred to take no part in this affair; he prudently holds back, he shies away, and lets the crowd push him into the council chamber, where the Queen, the young Dauphin, and the ladies have taken refuge.⁴⁸ There, with his tall, corpulent figure, he formed a sort of shield to forestall useless and compromising injuries. In the mean time, in the Oeil de Boeuf, he lets things take their course; everything will be done in his absence that ought to be done, and in this he seems to have calculated justly. -- On one side, in a window recess, sits the King on a bench, almost alone, while in front of him, as a guard, are four or five of the National Guards; on the other side, in the apartments, is an immense crowd, hourly increasing according as the rumor of the irruption spreads in the vicinity, fifteen or twenty thousand persons, a prodigious accumulation, a pell-mell traversed by eddies, a howling sea of bodies crushing each other, and of which the simple flux and reflux would flatten against the walls obstacles ten times as strong, an uproar sufficient to shatter the window panes, "frightful yells," curses and imprecations, "Down with M. Veto!" "Let Veto go to the devil!" "Take back the patriot ministers!" "He shall sign; we won't go away till he does!"⁴⁹ -- Foremost among them all, Legendre, more resolute than Santerre, declares himself the spokesman and trustee of the powers of the sovereign people: "Sir," says he to the King, who, he sees, makes a gesture of surprise, "yes, Sir, listen to us; you are made to listen to what we say! You are a traitor! You have always deceived us; you deceive us now! But look out, the measure is full; the people are tired of being played upon ! " -- " Sire, Sire," exclaims another fanatic, "I ask you in the name of the hundred thousand beings around us to recall the patriot ministers. . . I demand the sanction of the decree against the priests and the twenty thousand men. Either the sanction or you shall die!" -- But little is wanting for the threat to be carried out. The first comers are on hand, "presenting pikes," among them "a brigand," with a rusty sword blade on the end of a pole, "very sharp," and who points this at the King. Afterwards the attempt at assassination is many times renewed, obstinately, by three or four madmen determined to kill, and who make signs of so doing, one, a shabby, ragged fellow, who keeps up his excitement with "the foulest propositions," the second one, "a so- called conqueror of the Bastille," formerly porte-tête for Foulon and Berthier, and since driven out of the battalion, the third, a market- porter, who, "for more than an hour," armed with a saber, makes a terrible effort to make his way to the king.⁵⁰ -- Nothing is done. The king remains impassible under every threat. He takes the hand of a grenadier who wishes to encourage him, and, placing it on his breast, bids him, "See if that is the beating of a heart agitated by fear."⁵¹ To Legendre and the zealots who call upon him to sanction, he replies without the least excitement:

"I have never departed from the Constitution. . . . I will do what the Constitution requires me to do. . . . It is you who break the law."

-- And, for nearly three hours, remaining standing, blockaded on his bench,⁵² he persists in this without showing a sign of weakness or of anger. This cool deportment at last produces an effect, the impression it makes on the spectators not being at all that which they anticipated. It is very clear that the personage before them is not the monster which has been depicted to them, a somber, imperious tyrant, the savage, cunning Charles IX. they had hissed on the stage. They see a man somewhat stout, with placid, benevolent features, whom they would take, without his blue sash, for an ordinary, peaceable bourgeois.⁵³ His ministers, near by, three or four men in black coats, gentlemen and respectable employees, are just what they seem to be. In another window recess stands his sister, Madame Elizabeth, with her sweet and innocent face. This pretended tyrant is a man like other men; he speaks gently, he says that the law is on his side, and nobody says the contrary; perhaps he is less wrong than he is thought to be. If he would only become a patriot! -- A woman in the room brandishes a sword with a cockade on its point; the King makes a sign and the sword is handed to him, which he raises and, hurrahing with the crowd, cries out: Vive la Nation! That is already one good sign. A red cap is shaken in the air at the end of a pole. Some one offers it to him and he puts it on his head; applause bursts forth, and shouts of Vive la Nation! Vive la Liberte! and even vive le Roi!

From this time forth the greatest danger is over. But it is not that the besiegers abandon the siege. "He did damned well," they exclaim, "to put the cap on, and if he hadn't we would have seen what would come of it. And damn it, if he does not sanction the decree against the priests, and do it right off; we will come back every day. In this way we shall tire him out and make him afraid of us. -- But the day wears on. The heat is over-powering, the fatigue extreme, the King less deserted and better protected. Five or six of the deputies, three of the municipal officers, a few officers of the National Guard, have succeeded in making their way to him. Pétion himself, mounted on a sofa, harangues the people with his accustomed flattery.⁵⁴ At the same time Santerre, aware of the opportunity being lost, assumes the attitude of a liberator, and shouts in his rough voice: "I answer for the royal family. Let me see to it." A line of National Guards forms in front of the King, when, slowly and with difficulty, urged by the mayor, the crowd melts away, and, by eight o'clock in the evening, it is gone.

Indignation of the Constitutionalists. -- Cause of their weakness. -- The Girondins renew the attack. -- Their double plan.

As the blow has missed the target, it must be repeated. This is the more urgent, inasmuch as the faction has thrown off the mask and "honest people"¹ on all sides become indignant at seeing the Constitution subject to the arbitrariness of the lowest class. Nearly all the higher administrative bodies, seventy-five of the department directories,² give in their adhesion to Lafayette's letter, or respond by supporting the proclamation, so noble and so moderate, in which the King, recounting the violence done to him, maintains his legal rights with mournful, inflexible gentleness. Many of the towns, large and small, thank him for his firmness, the addresses being signed by "the notables of the place,"³ chevaliers of St. Louis, former officials, judges and district-administrators, physicians, notaries, lawyers, recorders, post-masters, manufacturers, merchants, people who are settled down, in short the most prominent and the most respected men. At Paris, a similar petition, drawn up by two former Constituents, contains 247 pages of signatures attested by 99 notaries.⁴ Even in the council-general of the commune a majority is in favor of publicly censuring the mayor Pétion, the syndic-attorney Manuel, and the police administrators Panis, Sergent, Viguer, and Perron.⁵ On the evening of June 20th, the department council orders an investigation; it follows this up; it urges it on; it proves by authentic documents the willful inaction, the hypocritical connivance, the double-dealing of the syndic-attorney and the mayor;⁶ it suspends both from their functions, and cites them before the courts as well as Santerre and his accomplices. Lafayette, finally, adding to the weight of his opinion the influence of his presence, appears at the bar of the National Assembly and demands "effectual" measures against the usurpations of the Jacobin sect, insisting that the instigators of the riot of the 20th of June be punished "as guilty of lése-nation." As a last and still more significant symptom, his proceedings are approved of in the Assembly by a majority of more than one hundred votes.⁷

All this must and will be crushed out. For on the side of the Constitutionalists, whatever they may be, whether King, deputies, ministers, generals, administrators, notables or national-guards, the will to act evaporates in words; and the reason is, they are civilized beings, long accustomed to the ways of a regular community, interested from father to son in keeping the law, disconcerted at the thought of consequences, upset by multifaceted ideas, unable to comprehend that, in the state of nature to which France has reverted, but one idea is of any account, that of the man who, in accepting a declared war, meets the offensive with the offensive, loads his gun, descends into the street and contends with the savage destroyers of human society. -- - Nobody comes to the support of Lafayette, who alone has the courage to take the lead; about one hundred men muster at the rendezvous named by him in the Champs-Élysées. They agree to march to the Jacobin club the following day and close it, provided the number is increased to three hundred; but the next day only thirty turn up. Lafayette can do no more than leave Paris and write a letter containing another protest. -- Protestations, appeals to the Constitution, to the law, to public interest, to common sense, well-reasoned arguments; this side will never resort to anything else than speeches and paperwork; and, in the coming conflict words will be of no use. -- Imagine a quarrel between two men, one ably presenting his case and the other indulging in little more than invective; the latter, having encountered an enormous mastiff on his road, has caressed him, enticed him, and led him along with him as an auxiliary. To the mastiff, clever argumentation is only so much unmeaning sound; with his eager eyes fixed on his temporary master he awaits only his signal to spring on the adversaries he points out. On the 20th of June he has almost strangled one of them, and covered him with his slaver. On the 21st,⁸ he is ready to spring again. He continues to growl for fifty days, at first sullenly and then with terrific energy. On the 25th of June, July 14 and 27, August 3 and 5, he again makes a spring and is kept back only with great difficulty.⁹ Already on one occasion, July 29th, his fangs are wet with human gore.¹⁰ -- At each turn of the parliamentary debate the defenseless Constitutionalists beholds those open jaws before him; it is not surprising that he throws to this dog, or allows to be thrown to him, all the decrees demanded by the Girondists as a bone for him to gnaw on. -- Sure of their strength the Girondists renew the attack, and the plan of their campaign seems to be skillfully prepared. They are quite willing to retain the King on his throne, but on the condition that he shall be a mere puppet; that he shall recall the patriot ministers, allow them to appoint the Dauphin's tutor, and that Lafayette shall be removed;¹¹ otherwise the Assembly will pass the act of de-thronement and seize the executive power. Such is the defile with two issues in which they have placed the Assembly and the King. If the King balks at leaving by the first door, the Assembly, equally nonplused, will leave through the second; in either case, as the all-powerful ministers of the submissive King or as executive delegates of the submissive Assembly, the Girondists will become the masters of France.

Pressure on the King. -- Pétion and Manual brought to the Hôtel-de- ville. -- The Ministry obliged to resign. -- Jacobin agitation against the King. -- Pressure on the Assembly. -- Petition of the Paris Commune. -- Threats of the petitioners and of the galleries. -- Session of August 8th. -- Girondist strategy foiled in two ways.

With this in mind they begin by attacking the King, and try to make him yield through fear. -- They remove the suspension pronounced against Pétion and Manuel, and restore them both to their places in the Hôtel-de-ville. They will from now on rule Paris without restriction or supervision; for the Directory of the department has resigned, and no superior authority exists to prevent them from calling upon or giving orders as they please to the armed forces; they are exempt from all subordination, as well as from all control. Behold the King of France in good hands, in those of the men who, on the 20th of June, refused to nuzzle the popular brute, declaring that it had done well, that it had right on its side, and that it may begin again. According to them, the palace of the monarch belongs to the public; people may enter it as they would a coffee-house; in any event, as the municipality is occupied with other matters, it cannot be expected to keep people out. "Is there nothing else to guard in Paris but the Tuileries and the King?"¹² -- Another maneuver consists in rendering the King's instruments powerless. Honorable and inoffensive as the new ministers may be, they never appear in the Assembly without being hooted at in the tribunes. Isnard, pointing with his finger to the principal one, exclaims: "That is a traitor!"¹³ Every popular outburst is imputed to them as a crime, while Guadet declares that, "as royal counselors, they are answerable for any disturbances" that the double veto might produce.¹⁴ Not only does the faction declare them guilty of the violence provoked by itself, but, again, it demands their lives for the murders which it commits. "France must know," says Vergniaud, "that hereafter ministers are to answer with their heads for any disorders of which religion is the pretext." -- "The blood just spilt at Bordeaux," says Ducos, "may be laid at the door of the executive power. "¹⁵ La Source proposes to "punish with death," not alone the minister who is not prompt in ordering the execution of a decree, but, again, the clerks who do not fulfill the minister's instructions. Always death on every occasion, and for every one who is not of the sect. Under this constant terror, the ministers resign in a body, and the King is required at once to appoint others; meanwhile, to increase the danger of their position, the Assembly decrees that hereafter they shall "be answerable for each other." It is evident that they are aiming at the King over his minister's shoulders, while the Girondists leave nothing unturned to render government to him impossible. The King, again, signs this new decree; he declines to protest; to the persecution he is forced to undergo he opposes nothing but silence, sometimes a simple, frank, good-hearted expression,¹⁶ some kindly, touching complaining, which seems like a suppressed moan.¹⁷ But dogmatic obstinacy and impatient ambition are willfully deaf to the most sorrowful strains! His sincerity passes for a new false-hood. Vergniaud, Brissot, Torné, Condorcet, in the tribune, charge him with treachery, demand from the Assembly the right of suspending him,¹⁸ and give the signal to their Jacobin auxiliaries. -- At the invitation of the parent club, the provincial branches bestir themselves, while all other instruments of agitation belonging to the revolutionary machine are likewise put in motion, -- gatherings on the public squares, homicidal announcements on the walls, incendiary resolutions in the clubs, shouting in the tribunes, insulting addresses and seditious deputations at the bar of the National Assembly.¹⁹ After the working of this system for a month, the Girondists regard the King as subdued, and, on the 26th of July, Guadet, and then Brissot, in the tribune, make their last advances to him, and issue the final summons.²⁰ A profound delusion! He refuses, the same as on the 20th of June: "Girondist ministers, Never!"

Since he bars one of the two doors, they will pass out at the other, and, if the Girondists cannot rule through him, they will rule without him. Pétion, in the name of the Commune, appears personally and proposes a new plan, demanding the dethronement. "This important measure once passed,"²¹ he says, "the confidence of the nation in the actual dynasty being very doubtful, we demand that a body of ministers, jointly responsible, appointed by the National Assembly, but, as the constitutional law provides, outside of itself, elected by the open vote of freemen, be provisionally entrusted with the executive power." Through this open vote the suffrage will be easily controlled. This is but one more decree extorted, like so many others, the majority for a long time having been subject to the same pressure as the King. "If you refuse to respond to our wishes," as a placard of the 23rd of June had already informed them, "our hands are lifted, and we shall strike all traitors wherever they can be found, even amongst yourselves."²² -- "Court favorites," says a petition of August 6, "have seats in your midst. Let their inviolability perish if the national will must always tamely submit to that lethal power!" -- In the Assembly the yells from the galleries are frightful; the voices of those who speak against dethronement are overpowered; so great are the hooting, the speakers are driven out of the tribune.²³ Sometimes the "Right" abandons the discussion and leaves the chamber. The insolence of the galleries goes so far that frequently almost the entire Assembly murmurs while they applaud; the majority, in short, loudly expresses anger at its bondage.²⁴ -- Let it be careful! In the tribunes and at the approaches to the edifice, stand the Federates, men who have a tight grip. They will force it to vote the decisive measure, the accusation of Lafayette, the decree under which the armed champion of the King and the Constitution must fall. The Girondists, to make sure of it, exact a call of the house; in this way the names are announced and printed, thus designating to the populace the opponents of the measure, so that none of them are sure of getting to their homes safe and sound. -- Lafayette, however, a liberal, a democrat, and a royalist, as devoted to the Revolution as to the Law, is just the man, who, through his limited mental grasp, his disconnected political conceptions, and the nobleness of his contradictory sentiments, best represents the present opinion of the Assembly, as well as that of France.²⁵ Moreover, his popularity, his courage, and his army are the last refuge. The majority feels that in giving him up they themselves are given up, and, by a vote of 400 to 224, it acquits him. -- On this side, again, the strategy of the Girondists is found erroneous. Power slips away from them the second time. Neither the King nor the Assembly have consented to restore it to them, while they can no longer leave it suspended in the air, or defer it until a better opportunity, and keep their Jacobin acolytes waiting. The feeble leash restraining the revolutionary dog breaks in their hands; the dog is free and in the street

The Girondins have worked for the benefit of the Jacobins. -- The armed force sent away or disorganized. -- The Federates summoned. -- Brest and Marseilles send men. -- Public sessions of administrative bodies. -- Permanence of administrative bodies and of the sections. -- - Effect of these two measures. -- The central bureau of the Hôtel- de-ville. -- Origin and formation of the revolutionary Commune.

Never was better work done for another. Every measure relied on by them for getting power back, serves only to place it in the hands of the mob. -- On the one hand, through a series of legislative acts and municipal ordinances, they have set aside or disbanded the army, alone capable of repressing or intimidating it. On the 29th of May they dismissed the king's guard. On the 15th of July they ordered away from Paris all regular troops. On the 16th of July,²⁶ they select " for the formation of a body of infantry-gendarmerie, the former French- guardsmen who served in the Revolution about the epoch of the 1st day of June, 1789, the officers, under-officers, gunners, and soldiers who gathered around the flag of liberty after the 12th of July of that year," that is to say, a body of recognized insurgents and deserters. On the 6th of July, in all towns of 50,000 souls and over, they strike down the National Guard by discharging its staff, "an aristocratic corporation," says a petition,²⁷ "a sort of modern feudality composed of traitors, who seem to have formed a plan for directing public opinion as they please." Early in August,²⁸ they strike into the heart of the National Guard by suppressing special companies, grenadiers, and chasseurs, recruited amongst well-to-do-people, the genuine elite, stripped of its uniform, reduced to equality, lost in the mass, and now, moreover, finding its 'ranks degraded by a mixture of interlopers, federates, and men armed with pikes. Finally, to complete the pell-mell, they order that the palace guard be hereafter composed daily of citizens taken from the sixty battalions,²⁹ so that the chiefs may no longer know their men nor the men their chiefs; so that no one may place confidence in his chief, in his subordinate, in his neighbor, or in himself; so that all the stones of the human dike may be loosened beforehand, and the barrier crumble at the first onslaught. -- On the other hand, they have taken care to provide the insurrection with a fighting army and an advanced guard. By another series of legislative acts and municipal ordinances, they authorize the assemblage of the Federates at Paris; they allow them pay and military lodgings;³⁰ they allow them to organize under a central committee sitting at the Jacobin club, and to take their instructions from that club. Of these new-comers, two-thirds, genuine soldiers and true patriots, set out for the camp at Soissons and for the frontier; one-third of them, however, remain at Paris,³¹ perhaps 2,000, the rioters and politicians, who, feasted, entertained, indoctrinated, and each lodged with a Jacobin, become more Jacobin than their hosts, and incorporate themselves with the revolutionary battalions, so as to serve the good cause with their guns.³² -- Two squads, late comers, remain separate, and are only the more formidable; both are dispatched by the towns on the sea-cost in which, four months before this, "twenty-one capital acts of insurrection had occurred, all unpunished, and several under sentence of the maritime jury."³³ The first, numbering 300 men, comes from Brest,

* where the municipality, as infatuated as those of Marseilles and Avignon, engages in armed expeditions against its neighbors; where popular murder is tolerated;

* where M. de la Jaille is nearly killed ;

* where the head of M. de la Patry is borne on a pike;

* where veteran rioters compose the crews of the fleet,

* where "workers paid by the State, clerks, masters, non-commission officers, converted into agitators, political stump-speakers, movers, and critics of the administration," ask only to be given roles to perform on a more conspicuous stage.

The second troop, summoned from Marseilles by the Girondins, Rebecqui, and Barbaroux,³⁴ comprises 516 men, intrepid, ferocious adventurers, from everywhere, either Marseilles or abroad, Savoyards, Italians, Spaniards, driven out of their country, almost all of the vilest class, or gaining a livelihood by infamous pursuits, "hit-men and their henchmen of evil haunts," used to blood, quick to strike, good cut-throats, picked men out of the bands that had marched on Aix, Arles, and Avignon, the froth of that froth which, for three years, in the Comtat and in the Bouches-du-Rhône, boiled over the useless barriers of the law. -- The very day they reach Paris they show what they can do.³⁵ Welcomed with great pomp by the Jacobins and by Santerre, they are conducted, for a purpose, to the Champs-Elysées, into a tavern, near the restaurant in which the grenadiers of the Filles St. Thomas, bankers, brokers, leading men, well-known for their attachment to a monarchical constitution, were dining in a body, as announced several days in advance. The mob which had formed a convoy for the Marseilles battalion, gathers before the restaurant, shouts, throws mud, and then lets fly a volley of stones ; the grenadiers draw their sabers. Forthwith a shout is heard just in front of them, à nous les Marseillais! upon which the gang jump out of the windows with true southern agility, clamber across the ditches, fall upon the grenadiers with their swords, kill one and wound fifteen. -- No début could be more brilliant. The party at last possesses men of action;³⁶ and they must be kept within reach! Men who do such good work, and so expeditiously, must be well posted near the Tuileries. The mayor, consequently, on the night of the 8th of August, without informing the commanding general, solely on his own authority, orders them to leave their barracks in the Rue Blanche and take up their quarters, with their arms and cannon, in the barracks belonging to the Cordeliers.³⁷

Such is the military force in the hands of the Jacobin masses; nothing remains but to place the civil power in their hands also, and, as the first gift of this kind was made to them by the Girondins, they will not fail to make them the second one. -- On the 1st of July, they decree that the sessions of administrative bodies should thenceforth be public; this is submitting municipalities, district, and department councils, as well as the National Assembly itself, to the clamor, the outrages, the menaces, the rule of their audiences, which in these bodies as in the National Assembly, will always be Jacobin.³⁸ On the 11th of July, on declaring the country in danger,³⁹ they render the sessions permanent, first of the administrative bodies, and next of the forty-eight sections of Paris, which is a surrender of the administrative bodies and the forty-eight sections of Paris to the Jacobin minority, which minority, through its zeal and being ever present, knows how to convert itself into a majority. -- Let us trace the consequences of this, and see the selection which is thus effected by the double decree. Those who attend these meetings, day and night, are not the steady, busy people. In the first place, they are too busy in their own counting-rooms, shops and factories to lose so much time. In the next place, they are too sensible, to docile, and too honest to go and lord it over their magistrates in the Hôtel-de- ville, or regard themselves in their various sections as the sovereign people. Moreover, they are disgusted with all this bawling. Lastly, the streets of Paris, especially at night, are not safe; owing to so much outdoor politics, there is a great increase of caning and of knocking down. Accordingly, for a long time, they do not attend at the clubs, nor are they seen in the galleries of the National Assembly; nor will they be seen again at the sessions of the municipality, nor at the meetings of the sections. -- Nothing, on the other hand, is more attractive to the idle tipplers of the cafés, to bar-room oracles, loungers, and talkers, living in furnished rooms,⁴⁰ to the parasites and refractory of the social army, to all who have left the social structures and unable to get back again, who want to tear things to pieces, and, for lack of a private career, establish one for themselves in public. Permanent sessions, even at night, are not too long either for them, or for lazy Federates, for disordered intellects, and for the small troop of genuine fanatics