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The French Revolution - Volume 3

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Title: The French Revolution - Volume 3

Author: Hippolyte Taine

Annotator: Svend Rom

Translator: John Durand


        
Release date: June 22, 2008 [eBook #2580]
                Most recently updated: July 14, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2580

Credits: Produced by Svend Rom and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRENCH REVOLUTION - VOLUME 3 ***




Produced by Svend Rom





THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY FRANCE, VOLUME 4

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, VOLUME 3.

by Hippolyte A. Taine



     Please note that all references to earlier Volumes of the
     Origines of Contemporary France are to the American edition.
     Since there are no fixed page numbers in the Gutenberg
     edition these page numbers are only approximate. (SR).


     THE FRENCH REVOLUTION VOLUME III.

     PREFACE.
     BOOK FIRST. The Establishment of the Revolutionary Government.
     CHAPTER I.
     BOOK SECOND. The Jacobin Program.
     CHAPTER I.
     CHAPTER II.
     BOOK THIRD. The Governors.
     CHAPTER I. Psychology of the Jacobin Leaders.
     CHAPTER II. The Rulers of the Country.
     CHAPTER III. The Rulers. (continued).
     BOOK FOURTH. The Governed.
     CHAPTER I. The Oppressed.
     CHAPTER II. Food and Provisions.
     BOOK FIFTH. The End of the Revolutionary Government.
     CHAPTER I.




PREFACE.

"In Egypt," says Clement of Alexandria,[1101] "the sanctuaries of the
temples are shaded by curtains of golden tissue. But on going further
into the interior in quest of the statue, a priest of grave aspect,
advancing to meet you and chanting a hymn in the Egyptian tongue,
slightly raises a veil to show you the god. And what do you behold? A
crocodile, or some indigenous serpent, or other dangerous animal, the
Egyptian god being a beast sprawling on a purple carpet."

We need not visit Egypt or go so far back in history to encounter
crocodile worship, as this can be readily found in France at the end
of the last century.--Unfortunately, a hundred years is too long an
interval, too far away, for an imaginative retrospect of the past. At
the present time, standing where we do and regarding the horizon behind
us, we see only forms which the intervening atmosphere embellishes,
shimmering contours which each spectator may interpret in his own
fashion; no distinct, animated figure, but merely a mass of moving
points, forming and dissolving in the midst of picturesque architecture.
I was anxious to take a closer view of these vague points, and,
accordingly, deported myself back to the last half of the eighteenth
century. I have now been living with them for twelve years, and, like
Clement of Alexandria, examined, first, the temple, and next the god.
A passing glance at these is not sufficient; it was also necessary
to understand the theology on which this cult is founded. This one,
explained by a very specious theology, like most others, is composed of
dogmas called the principles of 1789; they were proclaimed, indeed, at
that date, having been previously formulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

* The well known sovereignty of the people.

* The rights of Man.

* The social contract.

Once adopted, their practical results unfolded themselves naturally. In
three years these dogmas installed the crocodile on the purple carpet
insides the sanctuary behind the golden veil. He was selected for the
place on account of the energy of his jaws and the capacity of his
stomach; he became a god through his qualities as a destructive brute
and man-eater.--Comprehending this, the rites which consecrate him and
the pomp which surrounds him need not give us any further concern.--We
can observe him, like any ordinary animal, and study his various
attitudes, as he lies in wait for his prey, springs upon it, tears it to
pieces, swallows it, and digests it. I have studied the details of his
structure, the play of his organs, his habits, his mode of living, his
instincts, his faculties, and his appetites.--Specimens abounded. I have
handled thousands of them, and have dissected hundreds of every species
and variety, always preserving the most valuable and characteristic
examples, but for lack of room I have been compelled to let many of them
go because my collections was too large. Those that I was able to
bring back with me will be found here, and, among others, about twenty
individuals of different dimensions, which--a difficult undertaking--I
have kept alive with great pains. At all events, they are intact and
perfect, and particularly the three largest. These seem to me, of their
kind, truly remarkable, and those in which the divinity of the day might
well incarnate himself.--Authentic and rather well kept cookbooks inform
us about the cost of the cult: We can more or less estimate how much the
sacred crocodiles consumed in ten years; we know their bills of daily
fare, their favorite morsels. Naturally, the god selected the fattest
victims, but his voracity was so great that he likewise bolted down,
and blindly, the lean ones, and in much greater number than the fattest.
Moreover, by virtue of his instincts, and an unfailing effect of the
situation, he ate his equals once or twice a year, except when they
succeeded in eating him.--This cult certainly is instructive, at least
to historians and men of pure science. If any believers in it still
remain I do not aim to convert them; one cannot argue with a devotee on
matters of faith. This volume, accordingly, like the others that have
gone before it, is written solely for amateurs of moral zoology, for
naturalists of the understanding, for seekers of truth, of texts, and
of proofs--for these alone and not for the public, whose mind is made up
and which has its own opinion on the Revolution. This opinion began to
be formed between 1825 and 1830, after the retirement or withdrawal of
eye witnesses. When they disappeared it was easy to convince a credulous
public that crocodiles were philanthropists; that many possessed
genius; that they scarcely ate others than the guilty, and that if they
sometimes ate too many it was unconsciously and in spite of themselves,
or through devotion and self-sacrifice for the common good.

H. A. Taine, Menthon Saint Bernard, July 1884.


*****





BOOK FIRST. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT.




CHAPTER I. JACOBIN GOVERNMENT




I. The despotic creed and instincts of the Jacobin.

     Weakness of former governments.--Energy of the new
     government.--The despotic creed and instincts of the
     Jacobin.

So far, the weakness of the legal government is extreme. During
four years, whatever its kind, it has constantly and everywhere been
disobeyed. For four years it never dared enforce obedience. Recruited
among the cultivated and refined class, the rulers of the country have
brought with them into power the prejudices and sensibilities of the
epoch. Under the influence of the prevailing dogma they have submitted
to the will of the multitude and, with too much faith in the rights
of Man, they have had too little in the authority of the magistrate.
Moreover, through humanity, they have abhorred bloodshed and, unwilling
to repress, they have allowed themselves to be repressed. Thus from
the 1st of May, 1789, to June 2, 1793, they have administrated or
legislated, escaping countless insurrections, almost all of them going
unpunished; while their constitution, an unhealthy product of theory and
fear, have done no more than transform spontaneous anarchy into legal
anarchy. Deliberately and through distrust of authority they have
undermined the principle of command, reduced the King to the post of a
decorative puppet, and almost annihilated the central power: from the
top to the bottom of the hierarchy the superior has lost his hold on
the inferior, the minister on the departments, the departments on the
districts, and the districts on the communes. Throughout all branches of
the service, the chief, elected on the spot and by his subordinates,
has come to depend on them. Thenceforth, each post in which authority
is vested is found isolated, dismantled and preyed upon, while, to
crown all, the Declaration of Rights, proclaiming "the jurisdiction of
constituents over their clerks,"[1102] has invited the assailants to
make the assault. On the strength of this a faction arises which ends in
becoming an organized band; under its clamor, its menaces and its pikes,
at Paris and in the provinces, at the polls and in the parliament,
the majorities are all silenced, while the minorities vote, decree and
govern; the Legislative Assembly is purged, the King is dethroned,
and the Convention is mutilated. Of all the garrisons of the central
citadel, whether royalists, Constitutionalists, or Girondins, not one
has been able to defend itself, to re-fashion the executive instrument,
to draw the sword and use it in the streets: on the first attack, often
at the first summons, all have surrendered, and now the citadel, with
every other public fortress, is in the hands of the Jacobins.


This time, its occupants are of a different stamp. Aside from the great
mass of well-disposed people fond of a quiet life, the Revolution has
sifted out and separated from the rest all who are fanatical, brutal
or perverse enough to have lost respect for others; these form the new
garrison--sectarians blinded by their creed, the roughs (assommeurs) who
are hardened by their calling, and those who make all they can out of
their offices. None of this class are scrupulous concerning human life
or property; for, as we have seen, they have shaped the theory to suit
themselves, and reduced popular sovereignty to their sovereignty.
The commonwealth, according to the Jacobin, is his; with him, the
commonwealth comprises all private possessions, bodies, estates, souls
and consciences; everything belongs to him; the fact of being a Jacobin
makes him legitimately czar and pope. Little does he care about the
wills of actually living Frenchmen; his mandate does not emanate from
a vote; it descends to him from aloft, conferred on him by Truth, by
Reason, by Virtue. As he alone is enlightened, and the only patriot,
he alone is worthy to take command, while resistance, according to his
imperious pride, is criminal. If the majority protests it is because
the majority is imbecile or corrupt; in either case, it deserves to be
brought to heel. And, in fact, the Jacobin only does that and right
away too; insurrections, usurpations, pillaging, murders, assaults on
individuals, on judges and public attorneys, on assemblies, violations
of law, attacks on the State, on communities--there is no outrage not
committed by him. He has always acted as sovereign instinctively; he
was so as a private individual and clubbist; he is not to cease being
so, now that he possesses legal authority, and all the more because if
he hesitates he knows he is lost; to save himself from the scaffold
he has no refuge but in a dictatorship. Such a man, unlike his
predecessors, will not allow himself to be turned out; on the contrary,
he will exact obedience at any cost. He will not hesitate to restore
the central power; he will put back the local wheels that have been
detached; he will repair the old forcing gear; he will set it agoing so
as to work more rudely and arbitrarily than ever, with greater contempt
for private rights and public liberties than either a Louis XIV. or a
Napoleon.




II. Jacobin Dissimulation.

     Contrast between his words and his acts.--How he
     dissimulates his change of front.--The Constitution of June,
     1793.--Its promises of freedom.

In the mean time, he has to harmonize his coming acts with his recent
declarations, which, at the first glance, seems a difficult operation:
for, in the speeches he has made he has already condemned the actions he
meditates. Yesterday he exaggerated the rights of the governed, even to
a suppression of those of the government; to-morrow he is to exaggerate
the rights of the people in power, even to suppressing those who are
governed. The people, as he puts it, is the sole sovereign, and he is
going to treat the people as slaves; the government, as he puts it, is
a valet, and he is going to endow the government with prerogatives of a
sultan. He has just denounced the slightest exercise of public
authority as a crime; he is now going to punish as a crime the slightest
resistance to public authority. What will justify such a volte-face and
with what excuse can he repudiate the principles with which he justified
his takeover?--He takes good care not to repudiate them; it would
drive the already rebellious provinces to extremes; on the contrary,
he proclaims them with renewed vigor, through which move the ignorant
crowd, seeing the same flask always presented to it, imagines that it is
always served with the same liquor, and is thus forced to drink tyranny
under the label of freedom. Whatever the charlatan can do with his
labels, signboards, shouting and lies for the next six months, will be
done to disguise the new nostrum; so much the worse for the public if,
later on, it discovers that the draught is bitter; sooner or later it
must swallow it, willingly or by compulsion: for, in the interval,
the instruments are being got ready to force it down the public
throat.[1103]

As a beginning, the Constitution, so long anticipated and so often
promised, is hastily fabricated:[1104] declarations of rights in
thirty-five articles, the Constitutional bill in one hundred and
twenty-four articles, political principles and institutions of every
sort, electoral, legislative, executive, administrative, judicial,
financial and military;[1105] in three weeks all is drawn up and passed
on the double.--Of course, the new Constitutionalists do not propose to
produce an effective and serviceable instrument; that is the least of
their worries. Hérault Séchelles, the reporter of the bill, writes on
the 7th of June, "to have procured for him at once the laws of Minos,
of which he has urgent need;" very urgent need, as he must hand in
the Constitution that week.[1106] Such circumstance is sufficiently
characteristic of both the workmen and the work. All is mere show and
pretense. Some of the workmen are shrewd politicians whose sole object
is to furnish the public with words instead of realities; others,
ordinary scribblers of abstractions, or even ignoramuses, and unable to
distinguish words from reality, imagine that they are framing laws by
stringing together a lot of phrases.--It is not a difficult job; the
phrases are ready-made to hand. "Let the plotters of anti-popular
systems," says the reporter, "painfully elaborate their projects!
Frenchmen.... have only to consult their hearts to read the Republic
there!"[1107] Drafted in accordance with the "Contrat-Social," filled
with Greek and Latin reminiscences, it is a summary "in pithy style" of
the manual of current aphorisms then in vogue, Rousseau's mathematical
formulas and prescriptions, "the axioms of truth and the consequences
flowing from these axioms," in short, a rectilinear constitution which
any school-boy may spout on leaving college. Like a handbill posted
on the door of a new shop, it promises to customers every imaginable
article that is handsome and desirable. Would you have rights and
liberties? You will find them all here. Never has the statement been so
clearly made, that the government is the servant, creature and tool
of the governed; it is instituted solely "to guarantee to them their
natural, imprescriptible rights." [1108] Never has a mandate been more
strictly limited: "The right of expressing one's thoughts and opinions,
either through the press or in any other way; the right of peaceful
assembly, the free exercise of worship, cannot be interdicted." Never
have citizens been more carefully guarded against the encroachments and
excesses of public authority: "The law should protect public and
private liberties against the oppression of those who govern...
offenses committed by the people's mandatories and agents must never
go unpunished. Let free men instantly put to death every individual
usurping sovereignty. .. Every act against a man outside of the
cases and forms which the law determines is arbitrary and tyrannical;
whosoever is subjected to violence in the execution of this act has the
right to repel it by force... When the government violates the people's
rights insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the
people, the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties."

To civil rights the generous legislator has added political rights, and
multiplied every precaution for maintaining the dependence of rulers on
the people.--In the first place, rulers are appointed by the people and
through direct choice or nearly direct choice: in primary meetings
the people elect deputies, city officers, justices of the peace, and
electors of the second degree; the latter, in their turn, elect in
the secondary meetings, district and department administrators, civil
arbitrators, criminal judges, judges of appeal and the eighty candidates
from amongst which the legislative body is to select its executive
council.--In the second place, all powers of whatever kind are never
conferred except for a very limited term: one year for deputies, for
electors of the second degree, for civil arbitrators, and for judges
of every kind and class. As to municipalities and also department and
district administrations, these are one-half renewable annually. Every
first of May the fountain-head of authority flows afresh, the people in
its primary assemblies, spontaneously formed, manifesting or changing at
will its staff of clerks.--In the third place, even when installed and
at work, the people may, if it pleases, become their collaborator:
means are provided for "deliberating" with its deputies. The latter,
on incidental questions, those of slight importance, on the ordinary
business of the year, may enact laws; but on matters of general,
considerable and permanent interest, they are simply to propose the
laws, while, especially as regards a declaration of war, the people
alone must decide. The people have a suspensive veto and, finally, a
definitive veto, which they may exercise when they please. To this end,
they may assemble in extraordinary session; one-fifth of the citizens
who have the right to vote suffice for their convocation. Once convoked,
the vote is determined by a Yes or a No on the act proposed by the
legislative body. If, at the expiration of forty days, one-tenth of the
primary assemblies in one-half of the departments vote No, there is
a suspensive veto. In that event all the primary assemblies of the
Republic must be convoked and if the majority still decides in the
negative, that is a definitive veto. The same formalities govern a
revision of the established constitution.--In all this, the plan of the
"Montagnards" is a further advance on that of the Girondins; never was
so insignificant a part assigned to the rulers nor so extensive a
part to the governed. The Jacobins profess a respect for the popular
initiative which amounts to a scruple.[1109] According to them the
sovereign people should be sovereign de facto, permanently, and without
interregnum, allowed to interfere in all serious affairs, and not
only possess the right, but the faculty, of imposing its will on its
mandatories.--All the stronger is the reason for referring to it the
institutions now being prepared for it. Hence the Convention, after the
parade is over, convokes the primary assemblies and submits to them for
ratification the Constitutional bill has been drawn up.




III. Primary Assemblies


     Primary Assemblies.--Proportion of Absentees.--Unanimity of
     the voters.--Their motives for accepting the Constitution.
     --Pressure brought to bear on voters.--Choice of Delegates.

The ratification will, undoubtedly, be approved. Everything has
been combined beforehand to secure it, also to secure it as wanted,
apparently spontaneously, and almost unanimously.--The primary
assemblies, indeed, are by no means fully attended; only one-half, or a
quarter, or a third of the electors in the cities deposit their votes,
while in the rural districts there is only a quarter, and less.[1110]
Repelled by their experience with previous convocations the electors
know too well the nature of these assemblies; how the Jacobin faction
rules them, how it manages the electoral comedy, with what violence
and threats it reduces all dissidents to voting either as figurants or
claqueurs. From four to five million of electors prefer to hold aloof
and stay at home as usual. Nevertheless the organization of most of the
assemblies takes place, amounting to some six or seven thousand. This is
accounted for by the fact that each canton contains its small group
of Jacobins. Next to these come the simple-minded who still believe in
official declarations; in their eyes a constitution which guarantees
private rights and institutes public liberties must be accepted, no
matter what hand may present it to them. And all the more readily
because the usurpers offer to resign; in effect, the Convention has
just solemnly declared that once the Constitution is adopted, the people
shall again be convoked to elect "a new national assembly... a
new representative body invested with a later and more immediate
trust,"[1111] which will allow electors, if they are so disposed, to
return honest deputies and exclude the knaves who now rule. Thereupon
even the insurgent departments, the mass of the Girondins population,
after a good deal of hesitation, resign themselves at last to voting for
it.[1112] This is done at Lyons and in the department of Calvados only
on the 30th of July. A number of Constitutionalists or neutrals have
done the same thing, some through a horror of civil war and a spirit of
conciliation, and others through fear of persecution and of being taxed
with royalism;[1113] one conception more: through docility they may
perhaps succeed in depriving the "Mountain" of all pretext for violence.

In this they greatly deceive themselves, and, from the first, they
are able to see once more the Jacobins interpretation of electoral
liberty.--At first, all the registered,[1114] and especially the
"suspects," are compelled to vote, and to vote Yes; otherwise, says a
Jacobin journal,[1115] "they themselves will indicate the true opinion
one ought to have of their attitudes, and no longer have reason to
complain of suspicions that are found to be so well grounded." They come
accordingly, "very humbly and very penitent." Nevertheless they meet
with a rebuff, and a cold shoulder is turned on them; they are consigned
to a corner of the room, or near the doors, and are openly insulted.
Thus received, it is clear that they will keep quiet and not risk the
slightest objection. At Macon "a few aristocrats muttered to themselves,
but not one dared say No."[1116] It would, indeed, be extremely
imprudent. At Montbrison, "six individuals who decline to vote," are
denounced in the procès-verbal of the Canton, while a deputy in the
Convention demands "severe measures" against them. At Nogent-sur-Seine,
three administrators, guilty of the same offense, are to be turned
out of office.[1117] A few months later, the offense becomes a capital
crime, and people are to be guillotined "for having voted against the
Constitution of 1793."[1118] Almost all the ill-disposed foresaw this
danger; hence, in nearly all the primary assemblies, the adoption is
unanimous, or nearly unanimous.[1119] At Rouen, there are but twenty-six
adverse votes; at Caen, the center of the Girondin opposition, fourteen;
at Rheims, there are only two; at Troyes, Besançon, Limoges and Paris,
there are none at all; in fifteen departments the number of negatives
varies from five to one; not one is found in Var; this apparent unity is
most instructive. The commune of St. Donau, the only one in France, in
the remote district of Cotês-du-Nord, dares demand the restoration of
the clergy and the son of Capet for king. All the others vote as
if directed with a baton; they have understood the secret of the
plebiscite; that it is a Jacobin demonstration, not an honest vote,
which is required.[1120] The operation undertaken by the local party is
actually carried out. It beats to arms around the ballot-box; it arrives
in force; it alone speaks with authority; it animates officers; it moves
all the resolutions and draws up the report of proceedings, while the
representatives on mission from Paris add to the weight of the local
authority that of the central authority. In the Macon assembly "they
address the people on each article; this speech is followed by
immense applause and redoubled shouting of Vive la République! Vive la
Constitution! Vive le Peuple Français!" Beware, ye lukewarm, who do not
join in the chorus! They are forced to vote "in a loud, intelligible
voice." They are required to shout in unison, to sign the grandiloquent
address in which the leaders testify their gratitude to the Convention,
and give their adhesion to the eminent patriots delegated by the primary
assembly to bear its report to Paris.[1121]




IV. The Delegates reach Paris

     The Delegates reach Paris.--Precautions taken against them.
     --Constraints and Seductions.

The first act of the comedy is over and the second act now begins.--The
faction has convoked the delegates of the primary assemblies to Paris
for a purpose. Like the primary assemblies, they are to serve as its
instruments for governing; they are to form the props of dictatorship,
and the object now is to restrict them to that task only.--Indeed, it
is not certain that all will lend themselves to it. For, among the eight
thousand commissioners, some, appointed by refractory assemblies, bring
a refusal instead of an adhesion;[1122] others, more numerous, are
instructed to present objections and point out omissions:[1123] it is
very certain that the envoys of the Girondist departments will insist on
the release or return of their excluded representatives. And lastly,
a good many delegates who have accepted the Constitution in good faith
desire its application as soon as possible, and that the Convention
should fulfill its promise of abdication, so as to give way to a new
Assembly.--As it is important to suppress at once all these vague
desires for independence or tendencies for opposition a decree of the
Convention "authorizes the Committee of General Security to order the
arrest of 'suspect' commissioners;" it is especially to look after those
who, "charged with a special mission, would hold meetings to win over
their colleagues,.... and engage them in proceedings contrary to their
mandate."[1124] In the first place, and before they are admitted
into Paris, their Jacobinism is to be verified, like a bale in the
customs-house, by the special agents of the executive council, and
especially by Stanislas Maillard, the famous September judge, and his
sixty-eight bearded ruffians, each receiving pay at five francs a day.
"On all the roads, within a circuit of fifteen or twenty leagues of the
capital," the delegates are searched; their trunks are opened, and their
letters read. At the barriers in Paris they find "inspectors" posted by
the Commune, under the pretext of protecting them against prostitutes
and swindlers. There, they are taken possession of, and conducted to
the mayoralty, where they receive lodging tickets, while a picket of
gendarmerie escorts them to their allotted domiciles.[1125]--Behold them
in pens like sheep, each in his numbered stall; there is no fear of
the dissidents trying to escape and form a band apart: one of them, who
comes to the Convention and asks for a separate hall for himself and his
adherents, is snubbed in the most outrageous manner; they denounce
him as an intriguer, and accuse him of a desire to defend the traitor
Castries; they take his name and credentials, and threaten him with an
investigation.[1126] The unfortunate speaker hears the Abbaye alluded
to, and evidently thinks himself fortunate to escape sleeping there
that night.--After this, it is certain that he will not again demand the
privilege of speaking, and that his colleagues will remain quiet; and
all this is the more likely

* because the revolutionary tribunal holds permanent sessions under
their eyes,

* because the guillotine is set up and in operation on the "Place de la
Révolution;"

* because a recent act of the Commune enjoins on the police "the most
active surveillance" and "constant patrols" by the armed force;

* because, from the first to the fourth of August, the barriers are
closed;

* because, on the 2nd of August, a raid into three of the theaters puts
five hundred young men in the lock-up,[1127]

so the discontented soon discover, if there are any, that this is not
the time or the place to protest.

As to the others, already Jacobin, the faction takes it upon itself to
render them still more so.--Lost in the immensity of Paris, all these
provincials require moral as well as physical guides; it agrees to
exercise toward them "hospitality in all its plenitude, the sweetest
of Republican virtues."[1128] Hence, ninety-six sans-culottes, selected
from among the sections, wait on them at the Mayoralty to serve as their
correspondents, and perhaps as their guarantees, and certainly as pilots

* to give them lodging-tickets,

* to escort and install them,

* to indoctrinate them, as formerly with the federates of July, 1792,

* to prevent their getting into bad company,

* to introduce them into all the exciting meetings,

* to see that their ardent patriotism quickly rises to the proper
temperature of Parisian Jacobinism.[1129]

The theaters must not offend their eyes or ears with pieces "opposed
to the spirit of the Revolution."[1130] An order is issued for the
performance three times a week of "republican tragedies, such as
'Brutus', 'William Tell', 'Caius Gracchus,' and other dramas suitable
for the maintenance of the principles of equality and liberty." Once a
week the theaters must be free, when Chéniér's alexandrines are spouted
on the stage to the edification of the delegates, crowded into the boxes
at the expense of the State. The following morning, led in groups into
the tribunes of the Convention,[1131] they there find the same, classic,
simple, declamatory, sanguinary tragedy, except that the latter is not
feigned but real, and the tirades are in prose instead of in verse.
Surrounded by paid yappers like victims for the ancient Romans
celebrations of purifications, our provincials applaud, cheer and get
excited, the same as on the night before at the signal given by the
claqueurs and the regulars. Another day, the procureur-syndic Lhullier
summons them to attend the "Evéché," to "fraternize with the authorities
of the Paris department;"[1132] the "Fraternité" section invites them
to its daily meetings; the Jacobin club lends them its vast hall in
the morning and admits them to its sessions in the evening.--Thus
monopolized and kept, as in a diving bell, they breathe in Paris nothing
but a Jacobin atmosphere; from one Jacobin den to another, as they are
led about in this heated atmosphere, their pulse beats more rapidly.
Many of them, who, on their arrival, were "plain, quiet people,"[1133]
but out of their element, subjected to contagion without any antidote,
quickly catch the revolutionary fever. The same as at an American
revival, under the constant pressure of preaching and singing, of shouts
and nervous spasms, the lukewarm and even the indifferent have not long
to wait before the delirium puts them in harmony with the converted.




V. Fête of August 10th

     They make their profession of Jacobin faith.--Their part in
     the Fête of August 10th.--Their enthusiasm.

On the 7th of August things come to a head.--Led by the department
and the municipality, a number of delegates march to the bar of the
Convention, and make a confession of Jacobin faith. "Soon," they
exclaim, "will search be made on the banks of the Seine for the foul
marsh intended to engulf us. Were the royalist and intriguers to die
of spite, we will live and die 'Montagnards.'"[1134] Applause and
embraces.--From thence they betake themselves to the Jacobin Club, where
one of them proposes an address prepared beforehand: the object of this
is to justify the 31st of May, and the 2nd of June, "to open the eyes"
of provincial France, to declare "war against the federalists."[1135]
"Down with the infamous libelers who have calumniated Paris!.... We
cherish but one sentiment, our souls are all melted into one... We form
here but one vast, terrible mountain, about to vomit forth its fires
on the royalists and supporters of tyranny." Applause and
cheers.--Robespierre declares that they are there to save the
country.[1136] On the following day, August 8th, this address is
presented to the Convention and Robespierre has a resolution adopted,
ordering it to be sent to the armies, to foreign powers and all the
Communes. More applause, more embraces, and more cheers.--On the 9th
of August,[1137] by order of the Convention, the delegates meet in
the Tuileries garden, where, divided into as many groups as there are
departments, they study the program drawn up by David, in order to
familiarize themselves with the parts they are to play in the festival
of the following day.

What an odd festival and how well it expresses the spirit of the time!
It is a sort of opera played in the streets by the public authorities,
with triumphant chariots, altars, censers, an Ark of the Covenant,
funeral urns, classic banners and other trappings! Its divinities
consist of plaster statues representing Nature, Liberty, the People, and
Hercules, all of which are personified abstractions, like those painted
on the ceiling of a theater. In all this there is no spontaneity nor
sincerity; the actors, whose consciences tell them that they are only
actors, render homage to symbols which they know to be nothing but
symbols, while the mechanical procession,[1138] the invocations, the
apostrophes, the postures, the gestures are regulated beforehand, the
same as by a ballet-manager. To any truth-loving person all this must
seem like a charade performed by puppets.--But the festival is colossal,
well calculated to stimulate the imagination and excite pride through
physical excitement.[1139] On this grandiose stage the delegates become
quite intoxicated with their part; for, evidently, theirs is the leading
part; they represent twenty-six millions of Frenchmen, and the sole
object of this ceremony is to glorify the national will of which they
are the bearers.--On the Place de la Bastille[1140] where the gigantic
effigy of nature pours forth from its two breasts "the regenerating
water," Hérault, the president, after offering libations and saluting
the new goddess, passes the cup to the eighty-seven elders (les doyens)
of the eighty-seven departments, each "summoned by sound of drum and
trumpet" to step forward and drink in his turn, while cannon belch forth
their thunders as if for a monarch. After the eighty-seven have passed
the cup around, the artillery roars. The procession them moves on, and
the delegates again are assigned the place of honor. The elders, holding
an olive-branch in one hand, and a pike in the other, with a streamer on
the end of it bearing the name of their department, "bound to each other
by a small three-color ribbon," surround the Convention as if to
convey the idea that the nation maintains and conducts its legal
representative. Behind them march the rest of the eight thousand
delegates, likewise holding olive-branches and forming a second distinct
body, the largest of all, and on which all eyes are centered. For, in
their wake, "their is no longer any distinction between persons and
functionaries," all being confounded together, marching pell-mell,
executive council, city officials, judges scattered about haphazard and,
by virtue of equality, lost in the crowd. At each station, thanks to
their insignia, the delegates form the most conspicuous element. On
reaching the last one, that of the Champ de Mars, they alone with the
Convention, ascend the steps leading to the alter of the country; on the
highest platform stands the eldest of all alongside the president of
the Convention, also standing; thus graded above each other, the seven
thousand, who envelope the seven hundred and fifty, form "the veritable
Sacred Mountain." Now, the president, on the highest platform, turns
toward the eighty-seven elders; he confides to the Ark containing the
Constitutional Act and the list of those who voted for it; they, on
their part, then advance and hand him their pikes, which he
gathers together into one bundle as an emblem of national unity and
indivisibility. At this, shouts arise from every point of the immense
enclosure; salvoes of artillery follow again and again; "one would say
that heaven and earth answered each other" in honor "of the greatest
epoch of humanity."--Certainly, the delegates are beside themselves;
their nerves, strained to the utmost, vibrates too powerfully; the
millennium discloses itself before their eyes. Already, many among them
on the Place de la Bastille, had addressed the universe; others, "seized
with a prophetic spirit," promise eternity to the Constitution. They
feel themselves "reborn again, along with the human species;" they
regard themselves as beings of a new world. History is consummated in
them; the future is in their hands; they believe themselves gods
on earth.--In this critical state, their reason, like a pair of
ill-balanced scales, yields to the slightest touch; under the pressure
of the manufacturers of enthusiasm, a sudden reaction will carry them
away. They consider the Constitution as a panacea, and they are going to
consign it, like some dangerous drug, to this coffer which they call an
ark. They have just proclaimed the liberty of the people, and are going
to perpetuate the dictatorship of the Convention.




VI. The Mountain.

     Maneuvers of the "Mountain."--The Jacobin Club on the eve of
     August 11th.--Session of the Convention on the 11th of
     August.--The Delegates initiate Terror.--Popular
     consecration of the Jacobin dictatorship.

This volteface has, of course, to appear spontaneous and the hand of the
titular rulers remain invisible: the Convention, as usual with usurpers,
is to simulate reserve and disinterestedness.--Consequently, the
following morning, August 11, on the opening of the session, it simply
declares that "its mission is fulfilled:"[1141] on the motion of
Lacroix, a confederate of Danton's, it passes a law that a new census
of the population and of electors shall be made with as little delay
as possible, in order to convoke the primary assemblies at once; it
welcomes with joy the delegates who bring to it the Constitutional Ark;
the entire Assembly rises in the presence of this sacred receptacle,
and allows the delegates to exhort it and instruct it concerning its
duties.[1142] But in the evening, at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre,
after a long and vague discourse on public dangers, conspiracies, and
traitors, suddenly utters the decisive words:

"The most important of my reflections was about to escape me[1143]...
The proposition made this morning will only facilitate the replacement
of the purified members of this Convention by the envoys of Pitt and
Cobourg."

Dreadful words in the mouth of a man of principles! They are at once
understood by the leaders, great and small, also by the selected fifteen
hundred Jacobins then filling the hall. "No! no! shouts the entire
club." The delegates are carried away:

"I demand," exclaims one of them, "that the dissolution of the
Convention be postponed until the end of the war."--

At last, the precious motion, so long desired and anticipated, is made:
the calumnies of the Girondins now fall the ground; it is demonstrated
that the Convention does not desire to perpetuate itself and that it has
no ambition; if it remains in power it is because it is kept there; the
delegates of the people compel it to stay.

And better still, they are going to mark out its course of action.--The
next day, the 12th of August, with the zeal of new converts, they spread
themselves through the hall in such numbers that Assembly, no longer
able to carry on is deliberations, crowds toward the left and yields
the whole of the space on the right that they may occupy and "purify"
it.[1144] All the combustible material in their minds, accumulated
during the past fortnight, takes fire and explodes; they are more
furious than the most ultra Jacobins; they repeat at the bar of the
house the extravagances of Rose Lacombe, and of the lowest clubs; they
even transcend the program drawn up by the "Mountain." "The time for
deliberation is past," exclaims their spokesman, "we must act[1145]...
Let the people rouse themselves in a mass... it alone can annihilate its
enemies... We demand that all 'suspects' be put under arrest; that
they be dispatched to the frontiers, followed by the terrible mass of
sans-culottes. There, in the front ranks, they will be obliged to fight
for that liberty which they have outraged for the past four years, or
be immolated on the tyrants' cannon.... Women, children, old men and
the infirm shall be kept as hostages by the women and children of
sans-culottes." Danton seizes the opportunity. With his usual lucidity
he finds the expression which describes the situation:

"The deputies of the primary assemblies," he says, "have just begun to
practice among us the initiative of terror."

He moreover reduces the absurd notions of the fanatics to a practical
measure: "A mobilization en masse, yes, but with order" by at once
calling out the first class of conscript, all men from eighteen to
twenty-five years of age; the arrest of all 'suspects', yes, but not to
lead them against the enemy; "they would be more dangerous than useful
in our armies; let us shut them up; they will be our hostages."--He also
proposes employment for the delegates who are only in the way in Paris
and might be useful in the provinces. Let us make of them "various kinds
of representatives charged with animating citizens... Let them, along
with all good citizens and the constituted authorities, take charge of
the inventories of grain and arms, and make requisitions for men, and
let the Committee of Public Safety direct this sublime movement....
All will swear that, on returning to their homes, they will give this
impulse their fellow citizens." Universal applause; the delegates
exclaim in one voice, "We swear!" Everybody springs to his feet; the men
in the tribunes wave their hats and likewise should the same oath.--The
scheme is successful; a semblance of popular will has authorized the
staff of officials, the policy, the principles and the very name of
Terror. As to the instruments for the operation they are all there ready
to be back into action. The delegates, of whose demands and interference
the "Mountain" is still in dread, are sent back to their departmental
holes, where they shall serve as agents and missionaries.[1146] There is
no further mention of putting the Constitution into operation; this
was simply a bait, a decoy, contrived for fishing in turbid waters: the
fishing ended, the Constitution is now placed in a conspicuous place
in the hall, in a small monument for which David furnished the
design.[1147]--The Convention, now, says Danton, "will rise to a sense
of its dignity, for it is now invested with the full power of the
nation." In other words, artifice completes what violence has begun.
Through the outrages committed in May and June, the Convention had lost
its legitimacy; through the maneuvers of July and August it recovered
the semblance of it. The Montagnards still hold their slave by his lash,
but they have restored his prestige so as to make the most of him to
their own profit.




VII. Extent and Manifesto of the departmental insurrection

     Effect of this maneuver.--Extent and Manifesto of the
     departmental insurrection.--Its fundamental weakness.--The
     mass of the population inert and distrustful.--The small
     number of Girondists.--Their lukewarm adherents.--Scruples
     of fugitive deputies and insurgent administrators.--They
     form no central government.--They leave military authority
     in the hands of the Convention.--Fatal progress of their
     concessions.--Withdrawal of the departments one by one.
     --Retraction of the compromised authorities.--Effect of
     administrative habits.--Failings and illusions of the
     Moderates.--Opposite character of the Jacobins.

With the same blow, and amongst the same playacting, they have nearly
disarmed their adversaries.--On learning the events of May 31 and June
2, a loud cry of indignation arose among republicans of the cultivated
class in this generation, who, educated by the philosophers,
sincerely believed in the rights of man.[1148] Sixty-nine department
administrations had protested,[1149] and, in almost all the towns of the
west, the south, the east and the center of France, at Caen, Alençon,
Evreux, Rennes, Brest, Lorient, Nantes and Limoges, at Bordeaux,
Toulouse, Montpellier, Nîmes and Marseilles, at Grenoble, Lyons,
Clermont, Lons-le-Saunier, Besançon, Mâcon and Dijon,[1150] the
citizens, assembled in their sections, had provoked, or maintained by
cheering them on, the acts of their administrators. Rulers and citizens,
all declared that, the Convention not being free, its decrees after
the 31st of May, no longer had the force of law; that the troops of
the departments should march on Paris to deliver that city from its
oppressors, and that their substitutes should be called out and assemble
at Bourges. In many places words were converted into acts. Already
before the end of May, Marseilles and Lyons had taken up arms and
checkmated their local Jacobins. After the 2nd of June, Normandy,
Brittany, Gard, Jura, Toulouse and Bordeaux, had also raised troops. At
Marseilles, Bordeaux and Caen representatives on mission, arrested or
under guard, were retained as hostages.[1151] At Nantes, the national
Guard and popular magistrates who, a week before, had so bravely
repulsed the great Vendéan army, dared to more than this; they limited
the powers of the Convention and condemned all meddling: according to
them, the sending of representatives on mission was "an usurpation, an
attack on national sovereignty;" representatives had been elected

"to make and not to execute laws, to prepare a constitution and regulate
all public powers, and not to confound these together and exercise
them all at once; to protect and maintain intermediary powers which
the people have delegated, and not to encroach upon and annihilate
them."[1152]

With still greater boldness, Montpellier enjoined all representatives
everywhere to meet at the headquarters of their respective departments,
and await the verdict of a national jury. In short, in accordance with
the very democratic creed, "nothing was visible amid the ruins of the
Convention," mutilated and degraded, but interloping "attorneys." "The
people's workmen" are summoned "to return to obedience and do justice to
the reproaches addressed to them by their legitimate master;"[1153]
the nation canceled the pay of its clerks at the capital, withdrew the
mandate they had misused, and declared them usurpers if they persisted
in not yielding up their borrowed sovereignty "to its inalienable
sovereignty."--To this stroke, which strikes deep, the "Mountain"
replies by a similar stroke; it also renders homage to principles and
falls back on the popular will. Through the sudden manufacture of an
ultra-democratic constitution, through a convocation of the primary
assemblies, and a ratification of its work by the people in these
assemblies, through the summoning of delegates to Paris, through the
assent of these converted, fascinated, or constrained delegates, it
exonerates and justifies itself, and thus deprives the Girondins of
the grievances to which they had given currency, of the axioms they had
displayed on their standards, and of the popularity they thought they
had acquired.[1154]--Henceforth, the ground their opponents had built on
sinks under their feet; the materials collected by them disintegrate
in their hands; their league dissolves before it is completed, and the
incurable weakness of the party appears in full daylight.

Firstly, in the departments, as at Paris,[1155] the party has no roots.
For the past three years all the sensible and orderly people, occupied
with their own affairs, who has no taste or interest in politics,
nine-tenths of the electors, abstain from voting and in this large mass
the Girondins have no adherents. As they themselves admit,[1156] this
class remains attached to the institutions of 1791, which they have
overthrown; if it has any esteem for them, it is as "extremely honest
madmen." Again, this esteem is mingled with aversion: it reproaches
them with the violent decrees they have passed in concert with the
"Mountain;" with persecutions, confiscations, every species of injustice
and cruelty; it always sees the King's blood on their hands; they,
too, are regicides, anti-Catholics, anti-Christians, demolishers and
levelers.[1157]--Undoubtedly they are less so than the "Mountain;"
hence, when the provincial insurrection breaks out, many Feuillants and
even Royalists follow them to the section assemblies and join in their
protests. But the majority goes no further, and soon falls back into
is accustomed inertia. It is not in harmony with its leaders:[1158]
its latent preferences are opposed to their avowed program; it does not
wholly trust them; it has only a half-way affection for them; its recent
sympathies are deadened by old animosities: everywhere, instead of
firmness there is only caprice. All this affords no assurance of
steadfast loyalty and practical adhesion. The Girondin deputies
scattered through the provinces relied upon each department arousing
itself at their summons and forming a republican Vendée against the
"Mountain:" nowhere do they find anything beyond mild approval and
speculative hopes.

There remains to support them the élite of the republican party, the
scholars and lovers of literature, who are honest and sincere thinkers,
who, worked upon by the current dogmas, have accepted the philosophical
catechism literally and seriously. Elected judges, or department,
district, and city administrators, commanders and officers of the
National Guard, presidents and secretaries of sections, they occupy
most of the places conferred by local authority, and hence their almost
unanimous protest seems at first to be the voice of France. In reality,
it is only the despairing cry of a group of staff-officers without an
army. Chosen under the electoral pressure with which we are familiar,
they possess rank, office and titles, but no credit or influence; they
are supported only by those whom they really represent, that is to
say, those who elected them, a tenth of the population, and forming a
sectarian minority. Again, in this minority there are a good many who
are lukewarm; with most men the distance is great between conviction and
action; the interval is filled up with acquired habits, indolence, fear
and egoism. One's belief in the abstractions of the "Contrat-social" is
of little account; no one readily bestirs oneself for an abstract end.
Uncertainties beset one at the outset; the road one has to follow is
found to be perilous and obscure, and one hesitates and postpones; one
feels himself a home-body and is afraid of engaging too deeply and of
going too far. Having expended one's breath in words one is less willing
to give one's money; another may open his purse but he may not be
disposed to give himself, which is as true of the Girondins as it is of
the Feuillants.

"At Marseilles,[1159] at Bordeaux," says a deputy, "in nearly all the
principal towns, the proprietor, slow, indifferent and timid, could not
make up his mind to leave home for a moment; it was to mercenaries that
he entrusted his cause his arms."

Only the federates of Mayenne, Ile-et-Vilaine, and especially of
Finisterre, were "young men well brought up and well informed about the
cause they were going to support." In Normandy, the Central Committee,
unable to do better, has to recruit its soldiers, and especially
gunners, from the band of Carabots, former Jacobins, a lot of ruffians
ready for anything, pillagers and runaways at the first canon-shot.
At Caen, Wimpffen, having ordered the eight battalions of the National
Guard to assemble in the court, demands volunteers and finds that only
seventeen step forth; on the following day a formal requisition brings
out only one hundred and thirty combatants; other towns, except Vire,
which furnishes about twenty, refuse their contingent. In short, a
marching army cannot be formed, or, if it does march, it halts at
the first station, that of Evreux before reaching Vernon, and that of
Marseilles at the walls of Avignon.

On the other hand, by virtue of being sincere and logical, those who
have rebelled entertain scruples and themselves define the limits of
their insurrection. The fugitive deputies at their head would believe
themselves guilty of usurpation had they, like the "Mountain" at Paris,
constituted themselves at Caen en sovereign assembly[1160]: according
to them, their right and their duty is reduced to giving testimony
concerning the 31st of May and the 1st of June, and to exhorting the
people and to being eloquent. They are not legally qualified to take
executive power; it is for the local magistrates, the élus(elected) of
the sections, and better still, the department committees to command
in the departments. Lodged as they are in official quarters, they
are merely to print formal statements, write letters, and, behaving
properly, wait until the sovereign people, their employer, reinstates
them. It has been outraged in their persons; it must avenge itself
for this outrage; since it approves of its mandatories, it is bound to
restore them to office; it being the master of the house, it is bound to
have its own way in the house.--As to the department committees, it is
true that, in the heat of the first excitement, they thought of forming
a new Convention at Bourges,[1161] either through a muster of substitute
deputies, or through the convocation of a national commission of one
hundred and seventy members. But time is wanting, also the means, to
carry out the plan; it remains suspended in the air like vain menace; at
the end of a fortnight it vanishes in smoke; the departments succeed in
federating only in scattered groups; they desist from the formation of
a central government, and thus, through this fact alone, condemn
themselves to succumb, one after the other, in detail, and each at
home.--What is worse, through conscientiousness and patriotism, they
prepare their own defeat: the refrain from calling upon the armies
and from stripping the frontiers; they do not contest the right of the
Convention to provide as it pleases for the national defense.
Lyons allows the passage of convoys of cannon-balls which are to be
subsequently used in cannonading its defenders[1162]. The authorities
of Puy-de-Dome aid by sending to Vendée the battalion that they
had organized against the "Mountain." Bordeaux is to surrender
Chateau-Trompette, its munitions of war and supplies, to the
representatives on mission; and, without a word, with exemplary
docility, both the Bordeaux battalions which guard Blaye suffer
themselves to be dislodged by two Jacobin battalions.[1163]
Comprehending the insurrection in this way, defeat is certain
beforehand.

The insurgents are thus conscious of their false position; they have a
vague sort of feeling that, in recognizing the military authority of the
Convention, they admit its authority in full; insensibly they glide down
this slope, from concession to concession, until they reach complete
submission. From the 16th of June, at Lyons,[1164] "people begin to
feel that it ought not break with the Convention." Five weeks later, the
authorities of Lyons "solemnly recognize that the Convention is the
sole central rallying point of all French citizens and republicans," and
decree that "all acts emanating from it concerning the general interests
of the republic are to be executed."[1165] Consequently, at Lyons and in
other departments, the administrations convoke the primary assemblies
as the Convention has prescribed; consequently, the primary assemblies
accept the Constitution which it has proposed; consequently, the
delegates of the primary assemblies betake themselves to Paris according
to its orders.--Henceforth, the Girondins' cause is lost; the discharge
of a few cannon at Vernon and Avignon disperse the only two columns
of soldiery that have set out on their march. In each department, the
Jacobins, encouraged by the representatives on mission, raise their
heads; everywhere the local club enjoins the local government to
submit,[1166] everywhere the local governments report the acts
they pass, make excuses and ask forgiveness. Proportionately to the
retraction of one department, the rest, feeling themselves abandoned,
are more disposed to retract. On the 9th of July forty-nine departments
are enumerated as having given in their adhesion. Several of them
declare that the scales have dropped from their eyes, that they approve
of the acts of May 31 and June 2, and thus ensure their safety by
manifesting their zeal. The administration of Calvados notifies the
Breton fédérés that "having accepted the Constitution it can no longer
tolerate their presence in Caen;" it sends them home, and secretly makes
peace with the "Mountain;" and only informs the deputies, who are its
guests, of this proceeding, three days afterwards, by postings on their
door the decree that declares them outlaws.

Disguised as soldiers, the latter depart along with the Breton fédérés;
on the way, they are able to ascertain the veritable sentiments of this
people whom they believe imbued with their rights and capable of taking
a political initiative.[1167] The pretended citizens and republicans
they have to do with are, in sum, the former subjects of Louis XVI. and
the future subjects of Napoleon I., that is to say, administrators and
people, disciplined by habit and instinctively subordinate, requiring a
government just as sheep require a shepherd and a watch-dog, accepting
or submitting to shepherd and dog, provided these look and act the
part, even if the shepherd be a butcher and the dog a wolf. To avoid
isolation, to rejoin the most numerous herd as soon as possible, to
always form masses and bodies and thus follow the impulsion which comes
from above, and gather together scattered individuals, such is the
instinct of the flock.

In the battalion of federates, they begin by saying that, as the
Constitution is now accepted and the convention recognized, it is no
longer allowed to protect deputies whom it has declared outlaws: "that
would be creating a faction." Thereupon, the deputies withdraw from the
battalion, and, in a little squad by themselves, march along separately.
As they are nineteen in number, resolute and well armed, the authorities
of the market-towns through which they pass make no opposition by force;
it would be offering battle, and that surpasses a functionary's
zeal; moreover, the population is either indifferent toward them or
sympathetic. Nevertheless, efforts are made to stop them, sometimes to
surround them and take them by surprise; for, a warrant of arrest is out
against them, transmitted through the hierarchical channel, and every
local magistrate feels bound to do his duty as gendarme. Under this
administrative network, the meshes of which they encounter everywhere,
the proscribed deputies can do naught else but hide in caves or escape
by sea.--On reaching Bordeaux, they find other sheep getting ready
for the slaughter-house. Saige, the mayor, preaches conciliation and
patience: he declines the aid of four or five thousand young men, three
thousand grenadiers of the National Guard, and two or three hundred
volunteers who had formed themselves into a club against the Jacobin
club. He persuades them to disband; he sends a deputation to Paris to
entreat the Convention to overlook "a moment of error" and pardon their
"brethren who had gone astray."--"They flattered themselves," says a
deputy, an eye-witness,[1168] "that prompt submission would appease
the resentment of tyrants and that these would be, or pretend to be,
generous enough to spare a town that had distinguished itself more than
any other during the Revolution." Up to the last, they are to entertain
the same illusions and manifest the same docility. When Tallien, with
his eighteen hundred peasants and brigands, enters Bordeaux, twelve
thousand National Guards, equipped, armed and in uniform, receive him
wearing oak-leaf crowns; they listen in silence to "his astounding
and outrageous discourse;" they suffer him to tear off their crowns,
cockades and epaulettes; the battalions allow themselves to be disbanded
on the spot; on returning to their quarters they listen with downcast
eyes to the proclamation which "orders all inhabitants without
distinction to bring their arms within thirty-six hours, under the
penalty of death, to the glacis of the Chateau-Trompette; before
the time elapses thirty thousand guns, swords, pistols and even
pocket-knives are given up."

Here, as at Paris, on the 20th of June, 10th of August, 2nd of
September, 3rd of May and 2nd of June, as at every critical moment of
the Revolution in Paris and the provinces, habits of subordination
and of amiability, stamped on a people by a provident monarchy and a
time-honored civilization, have blunted in man the foresight of danger,
his aggressive instinct, his independence and the faculty of depending
upon himself only, the willingness to help one another and of saving
himself. Inevitably, when anarchy brings a nation back to the state of
nature, the tame animals will be eaten by the savage ones,--these are
now let loose and immediately they show their true nature.




VIII. The Reasons for the Terror.

     The last local resistance.--Political orthodoxy of the
     insurgent towns.--They stipulate but one condition.--Reasons
     of State for granting this.--Party arguments against it.

If the men of the "Mountain" had been statesmen, or even sensible
men, they would have shown themselves humane, if not for the sake of
humanity, at least through calculation; for in this France, so little
republican, all the republican strength is not too great for the
founding of the Republic, while, through their principles, their
culture, their social position and their number, the Girondins form the
élite and the force, the flower and the sap of the party.--The death-cry
of the "Mountain" against the insurgents of Lozére[1169] and Vendée
can be understood: they had raised the king's white flag; they accepted
leaders and instructions from Coblentz and London. But neither Bordeaux,
Marseilles nor Lyons are royalist, or in alliance with the foreigner.

"We, rebels!" write the Lyonnese;[1170] "Why we see no other than the
tri-color flag waving; the white cockade, the symbol of rebellion, has
never been raised within our walls. We, royalists! Why, shouts of 'Long
live the Republic' are heard on all sides, and, spontaneously (in the
session of July 2nd) we have all sworn to fall upon whoever should
propose a king.... Your representatives tell you that we are
anti-revolutionaries, we who have accepted the Constitution. They tell
you that we protect émigrés when we have offered to surrender all those
that you might indicate. They tell you that our streets are filled
with refractory priests, when we have not even opened the doors of
Pierre-en-Cize (prison) to the thirty-two priests confined there by
the old municipality, without indictment, without any charge whatever
against them, solely because they were priests."

Thus, at Lyons, the pretended aristocrats were, then, not only
republicans but democrats and radicals, loyal to the established régime,
and submissive to the worst of the revolutionary laws, while the
same state of things prevailed at Bordeaux, at Marseilles and even at
Toulon.[1171] And furthermore, they accepted the outrages of May 31 and
June 2;[1172] they stopped contesting the usurpations of Paris; they no
longer insisted on the return of the excluded deputies. On the 2nd
of August at Bordeaux, and the 30th of July at Lyons, the
Committee-Extraordinary of Public Safety resigned; there no longer
existed any rival assembly opposed to the Convention. After the 24th of
July,[1173] Lyons solemnly recognized the supreme and central authority,
reserving nothing but its municipal franchises.--And better still, in
striking testimony of political orthodoxy, the Council-General of the
department prescribed a civic festival for the 10th of August analogous
to that of Paris. The Lyonnese, already blockaded, indulged in no
hostile manifestation; on the 7th of August they marched out of their
advanced positions to fraternize with the first body of troops sent
against them.[1174] They conceded everything, save on one point, which
they could not yield without destruction, namely, the assurance that
they should not be given up defenseless to the arbitrary judgment of
their local tyrants, to the spoliation, proscriptions and revenge of the
Jacobin rabble. In sum, at Marseilles and Bordeaux, especially at Lyons
and Toulon, the sections had revolted only on that account; acting
promptly and spontaneously, the people had thrust aside the knife which
a few ruffians aimed at their throats; they had not been, and were
not now, willing to be "Septemberised," that was their sole concern.
Provided they were not handed over to the butchers bound hand and foot,
they would open their gates. On these minimum terms the "Mountain" could
terminate the civil war before the end of July. It had only to follow
the example of Robert Lindet who, at Evreux the home of Buzot, at
Caen the home of Charlotte Corday and the central seat of the fugitive
Girondins, established permanent obedience through the moderation he had
shown and the promises he had kept.[1175] The measures that had pacified
the most compromised province would have brought back the others, and
through this policy, Paris, without striking a blow, would have secured
the three largest cities in France, the capital of the South-west, that
of the South, and the capital of the Center.

On the contrary, should Paris persist in imposing on them the domination
of its local Jacobins there was a risk of their being thrown into the
arms of the enemy. Rather than fall back into the hands of the bandits
who had ransomed and decimated them, Toulon, starved out, was about to
receive the English within its walls and surrender to them the great
arsenal of the South. Not less famished, Bordeaux might be tempted to
demand aid from another English fleet; a few marches would brings the
Piedmontese army to Lyons; France would then b cut in two, while the
plan of stirring up the South against the North was proposed to the
allies by the most clear-sighted of their councilors.[1176] Had this
plan been carried out it is probably that the country would have been
lost.--In any event, there was danger in driving the insurgents to
despair: for, between the unbridled dictatorship of their victorious
assassins and the musketry of the besieging army, there could be no
hesitation by men of any feeling; it was better to be beaten on the
ramparts than allow themselves to be bound for the guillotine; brought
to a stand under the scaffold, their sole resource was to depend
on themselves to the last.--Thus, through its unreasonableness, the
"Mountain" condemns itself to a number of sieges or blockades which
lasted several months,[1177] to leaving Var and Savoy unprotected, to
exhausting the arsenals, to employing against Frenchmen[1178] troops
and munitions needed against foreigners, and all this at the moment
the foreigner was taking Valenciennes[1179] and Mayence, when thirty
thousand royalist were organizing in Lozére, when the great Vendean
army was laying siege to Nantes, when each new outbreak of fighting was
threatening to connect the flaming frontier with the conflagration in
the Catholic countries.[1180]--With a jet of cold water aptly directed,
the "Mountain" could extinguish the fires it had kindled in the great
republican towns; otherwise, nothing remained but to let them increase
at the risk of consuming the whole country, with no other hope than
that they might at last die out under a mass of ruins, and with no other
object but to rule over captives and the dead.

But this is precisely the Jacobin aim; for, he is not satisfied with
less than absolute submission; he must rule at any cost, just as he
pleases, by fair means or foul, no matter over what ruins. A despot by
instinct and installation, his dogma has consecrated him King; he is
King by natural and divine right, in the name of eternal verity, the
same as Philip II., enthroned by his religious system and blessed by
his Holy Office. Hence he can abandon no jot or title of his authority
without a sacrifice of principle, nor treat with rebels, unless they
surrender at discretion; simply for having risen against legitimate
authority, they are traitors and villains. And who are greater rascals
the renegades who, after three years of patient effort, just as the sect
finally reaches its goal, oppose its accession to power![1181] At Nîmes,
Toulouse, Bordeaux, Toulon, and Lyons, not only have they interfered
with or arrested the blow which Paris struck, but they have put down the
aggressors, closed the club, disarmed the fanatical and imprisoned the
leading Maratists; and worse still, at Lyons and at Toulon, five or
six massacreurs, or promoters of massacre, Châlier and Riard, Jassaud,
Sylvestre and Lemaille, brought before the courts, have been condemned
and executed after a trial in which all the forms were strictly adhered
to.--That is the inexpiable crime; for, in this trial, the "Mountain"
is involved; the principles of Sylvestre and Châlier are its principles;
what is accomplished in Paris, they have attempted in the provinces; if
they are guilty, it is also guilty; it cannot tolerate their punishment
without assenting to its own punishment. Accordingly,

* it must proclaim them heroes and martyrs,

* it must canonize their memory,[1182]

* it must avenge their tortures,

* it must resume and complete their assaults,

* it must restore their accomplices to their places,

* it must render them omnipotent,

* it must force each rebel city to accept the rule of its rabble and
villains.

It matters little whether the Jacobins be a minority, whether at
Bordeaux, they have but four out of twenty-eight sections on their side,
at Marseilles five out of thirty-two, whether at Lyons they can count
up only fifteen hundred devoted adherents.[1183] Suffrages are not
reckoned, but weighed, for legality is founded, not on numbers, but on
patriotism, the sovereign people being composed wholly of sans-culottes.
So much the worse for towns where the anti-revolutionary majority is so
great; they are only more dangerous; under the republican demonstrations
is concealed the hostility of old parties and of the "suspect" classes,
the Moderates, the Feuillants and Royalists, merchants, men of the legal
profession, property-owners and muscadins.[1184] These towns are nests
of reptiles and must be crushed out.




IX. Destruction of Rebel Cities

     Bordeaux.--Marseilles.--Lyons.---Toulon.

Consequently, obedient or disobedient, they are crushed out. They
are declared traitors to the country, not merely the members of the
departmental committees, but, at Bordeaux, all who have "aided or
abetted the Committee of Public Safety;" at Lyons, all administrators,
functionaries, military or civil officers who "convoked or tolerated the
Rhône-et-Loire congress," and furthermore, "every individual whose son,
clerk, servant, or even day-laborer, may have borne arms or contributed
the means of resistance," that is to say, the entire National Guard
who took up arms, and nearly all the population which gave its money
or voted in the sections.[1185]--By virtue of this decree, all are
"outlaws," or, in other words subject to the guillotine just on the
establishment of their identity, and their property confiscated.
Consequently, at Bordeaux, where not a gun had been fired, the mayor
Saige, and principal author of the submission, is at once led to the
scaffold without any form of trial,[1186] while eight hundred and
eighty-one others succeed him amidst the solemn silence of a dismayed
population.[1187] Two hundred prominent merchants are arrested in one
night; more than fifteen hundred persons are imprisoned; all who are
well off are ransomed, even those against who no political charge could
be made; nine millions of fines are levied against "rich egoists." One
of these,[1188] accused of "indifference and moderatism," pays twenty
thousand francs "not to be harnessed to the car of the Revolution;"
another "convicted of having shown contempt for his section and for the
poor by giving thirty livres per months," is taxed at one million two
hundred thousand livres, while the new authorities, a crooked mayor and
twelve knaves composing the Revolutionary Committee, traffic in lives
and property.[1189] At Marseilles, says Danton,[1190] the object is
"to give the commercial aristocracy an important lesson;" we must
"show ourselves as terrible to traders as to nobles and priests;"
consequently, twelve thousand of them are proscribed and their
possessions sold.[1191] From the first day the guillotine works as
fast as possible; nevertheless, it does not work fast enough for
Representative Fréron who finds the means for making it work faster.

"The military commission we have established in place of the
revolutionary tribunal," he writes, "works frightfully fast against
the conspirators.... They fall like hail under the sword of the law.
Fourteen have already paid for their infamous treachery with their
heads. To-morrow, sixteen more are to be guillotined, all chiefs of
the legion, notaries, sectionists, members of the popular tribunal;
to-morrow, also, three merchants will dance the carmagnole, and they are
the ones we are after."[1192]

Men and things, all must perish; he wishes to demolish the city and
proposes to fill up the harbor. Restrained with great difficulty, Fréron
contents himself with a destruction of "the haunts" of the aristocracy,
two churches, the concert-hall, the houses around it, and twenty-three
buildings in which the rebel sections had held their meetings.

At Lyons, to increase the booty, the representatives had taken pains
to encourage the manufacturers and merchants with vague promises; these
opened their shops and brought their valuable goods, books and papers
out of their hiding-places. No time is lost in seizing the plunder; "a
list of all property belonging to the rich and to anti-revolutionaries"
is drawn up, which is "confiscated for the benefit of the patriots of
the city;" in addition to this a tax of six millions is imposed,
payable in eight days, by those whom the confiscation may have still
spared;[1193] it is proclaimed, according to principle, that the surplus
of each individual belongs by right to the sans-culottes, and whatever
may have been retained beyond the strictly necessary, is a robbery by
the individual to the detriment of the nation.[1194] In conformity with
this rule there is a general rounding up, prolonged for ten months,
which places the fortunes of a city of one hundred and twenty thousand
souls in the hands of its scoundrels. Thirty-two revolutionary
committees "whose members are thick as thieves select thousands of
guards devoted to them."[1195] In confiscated dwellings and warehouses,
they affix seals without an inventory; they drive out women and children
"so that there shall be no witnesses;" they keep the keys; they enter
and steal when they please, or install themselves for a revel with
prostitutes.--Meanwhile, the guillotine is kept going, and people are
fired at and shot down with grape-shot. The revolutionary committee
officially avow one thousand six hundred and eighty-two acts of murder
committed in five months,[1196] while a confederate of Robespierre's
privately declare that there were six thousand.[1197]

Blacksmiths are condemned to death for having shod the Lyonnese cavalry,
firemen for having extinguished fires kindled by republican bombshells,
a widow for having paid a war-tax during the siege, market women
for "having shown disrespect to patriots." It is an organized
"Septembrisade" made legal and lasting; its authors are so well
aware of the fact as to use the word itself in their public
correspondence.[1198]--At Toulon it is worse, people are slaughtered in
heaps, almost haphazard. Notwithstanding that the inhabitants the
most compromised, to the number of four thousand, take refuge on board
English vessels, the whole city, say the representatives, is guilty.
Four hundred workmen in the navy-yard having marched out to meet Fréron,
he reminds them that they kept on working during the English occupation
of the town, and he has them put to death on the spot. An order is
issued to all "good citizens to assemble in the Champ de Mars on penalty
of death." They come there to the number of three thousand; Fréron, on
horseback, surrounded by cannon and troops, arrives with about a hundred
Maratists, the former accomplices of Lemaille, Sylvestre, and other
well-known assassins, who form a body of local auxiliaries and
counselors; he tells them to select out of the crowd at pleasure
according to their grudge, fancy, or caprice; all who are designated
are ranged along a wall and shot. The next morning, and on the following
days, the operation is renewed: Fréron writes on the 16th of Nivose
that "eight hundred Toulonese have already been shot." ... "A volley
of musketry," says he, in another letter, and after that, volley after
volley, until "the traitors are all gone." Then, for three months after
this, the guillotine dispatches eighteen hundred persons; eleven young
women have to mount the scaffold together, in honor of a republican
festival; an old woman of ninety-four is borne to it in an armchair. The
population, initially of twenty-eight thousand people, is reduced to six
or seven thousand only.

All this is not enough; the two cities that dared maintain a siege must
disappear from the French soil. The Convention decrees that "the city
of Lyons shall be destroyed: every house occupied by a rich man shall be
demolished; only the dwellings of the poor shall remain, with edifices
specially devoted to industry, and monuments consecrated to humanity and
public education."[1199] The same at Toulon: "the houses within the town
shall be demolished; only the buildings that are essential for army and
navy purposes, for stores and munitions, shall be preserved."[11100]
Consequently, a requisition is made in Var and the neighboring
departments for twelve thousand masons to level Toulon to the
ground.--At Lyons, fourteen thousand laborers pull down the Chateau
Pierre-Encize; also the superb houses on Place Bellecour, those of the
Quai St.-Clair, those of the Rues de Flandre and de Bourgneuf, and many
others; the cost of all this amounts to four hundred thousand livres
per decade; in six months the Republic expends fifteen millions in
destroying property valued at three or four hundred millions, all
belonging to the Republic.[11101] Since the Mongols of the fifth
and thirteenth centuries, no such vast and irrational waste had been
seen--such frenzy against the most profitable fruits of industry and
human civilization.--Again, one can understand how the Mongols, who
were nomads, desired to convert the soil into one vast steppe. But, to
demolish a town whose arsenal and harbor is maintained by it, to destroy
the leaders of manufacturing interests and their dwellings in a city
where its workmen and factories are preserved, to keep up a fountain and
stop the stream which flows from it, or the stream without the fountain,
is so absurd that the idea could only enter the head of a Jacobin. His
imagination has run so wild and his prevision become so limited that
he is no longer aware of contradictions; the ferocious stupidity of the
barbarian and the fixed idea of the inquisition meet on common ground;
the earth is not big enough for any but himself and the orthodox of his
species. Employing absurd, inflated and sinister terms he decrees the
extermination of heretics: not only shall their monuments, dwellings and
persons be destroyed, but every vestige of them shall be eradicated and
their names lost to the memory of man.[11102]

"The name of Toulon shall be abolished; that commune shall henceforth
bear the name of Port-la-Montagne."--"The name of Lyons shall be
stricken off the list of towns belonging to the Republic; the remaining
collection of houses shall henceforth bear the name of Ville-Affranchie.
A column shall be erected on the ruins of Lyons bearing this
inscription: 'Lyons made war on Liberty! Lyons is no more!'"




X. Destruction of the Girondin party

     Destruction of the Girondin party.--Proscription of the
     Deputies of the "Right".--Imprisonment of the 73.--Execution
     of the 21.--Execution, suicide, or flight of the rest.

In all this there is no intention to spare in Paris the chiefs of the
insurrection or of the party, either deputies or ministers; on the
contrary, the object is to complete the subjection of the Convention,
to stifle the murmurs of the "Right," to impose silence on Ducos,
Boyer-Fonfrède, Vernier, and Couhey, who still speak and protest.[11103]
Hence the decrees of arrest or death, launched weekly from the top
of the "Mountain," fall on the majority like guns fired into a crowd.
Decrees of accusation follow: on the 15th of June, against Duchâtel, on
the 17th against Barbaroux, on the 23rd against Brissot, on the 8th of
July against Devérité and Condorcet, on the 14th against Lauze-Deperret
and Fauchet, on the 30th against Duprat Jr., Valée and Mainvielle,
on the 2nd of August against Rouyer, Brunel and Carra; Carra,
Lauze-Deperret and Fauchet, present during the session, are seized on
the spot, which is plain physical warning: none is more effective to
check the unruly.--Decrees are passed on the 18th of July accusing
Coustard, on the 28th of July against Gensonné, La Source, Vergniaud,
Mollevaut, Gardien, Grangeneuve, Fauchet, Boilleau, Valazé, Cussy,
Meillan; each being aware that the tribunal before which he must appear
is the waiting room to the guillotine.--Decrees of condemnation are
passed on the 12th of July against Birotteau, the 28 of July against
Buzot, Barbaroux, Gorsas, Lanjuniais, Salles, Louvet, Bergoeing,
Pétion, Guadet, Chasset, Chambon, Lidon, Valady, Defermon, Kervelégen,
Larivière, Rabaut-Saint-Étienne, and Lesage; pronounced outlaws and
traitors, they are to be led to the scaffold without trial as soon as
they can be got hold of.--Finally, on the 3rd of October, a great
haul of the net in the Assembly itself sweeps off the benches all the
deputies that still seem capable of any independence: the first thing is
to close the doors of the hall, which is done by Amar, reporter of the
Committee of General Security;[11104] then, after a declamatory and
calumnious speech, which lasts two hours, he reads off names on two
lists of proscriptions: forty-five deputies, more or less prominent
among the Girondins, are to be at once summoned before the revolutionary
tribunal; seventy-three others, who have signed secret protests against
the 31st of May and 2nd of June, are to be put in jail. No arguing!
the majority dares not even express an opinion. Some of the proscribed
attempt to exculpate themselves, but they are not allowed to be heard;
none but the Montagnards have the floor, and they do no more than add
to the lists, each according to personal enmity; Levasseur has Vigée put
down, and Duroi adds the name of Richon. One their names being called,
all the poor creatures who happen to be inscribed, quietly advance and
"huddle together within the bar of the house, like lambs destined to
slaughter," and here they are separated into two flocks; on the one hand
the seventy-three, and on the other, the ten or twelve who, with
the Girondins already kept under lock and key, are to furnish the
sacramental and popular number, the twenty-two traitors, whose
punishment is a requirement of the Jacobin imagination;[11105] on
the left, the batch for the prison; on the right, the batch for the
guillotine.

To those who might be tempted to imitate them or defend them this is
a sufficient lesson.--Subject to the boos, hisses and insults from the
hags lining the streets, the seventy-three[11106] are conducted to the
prisoners' room in the town hall. This, already full, is where they pass
the night standing on benches, scarcely able to breathe. The next day
they are crammed into the prison for assassins and robbers, "la Force,"
on the sixth story, under the roof; in this narrow garret their beds
touch each other, while two of the deputies are obliged to sleep on the
floor for lack of room. Under the skylights, which serve for windows,
and at the foot of the staircase are two pig-pens; at the end of
the apartment are the privies, and in one corner a night-tub, which
completes the poisoning of the atmosphere already vitiated by this
crowded mass of human beings. The beds consist of sacks of
straw swarming with vermin; they are compelled to endure the
discipline,[11107] rations and mess of convicts. And they are lucky to
escape at this rate: for Amar takes advantage of their silent deportment
to tax them with conspiracy; other Montagnards likewise want to arraign
them at the revolutionary Tribunal: at all events, it is agreed that the
Committee of General Security shall examine their records and maintain
the right of designating new culprits amongst them. For ten months
they thus remain under the knife, in daily expectation of joining the
twenty-two on the Place de la Révolution.--With respect to the latter,
the object is not to try them but to kill them, and the semblance of a
trial is simply judicial assassination; the bill of indictment against
them consists of club gossip; they are accused of having desired the
restoration of the monarchy, of being in correspondence with Pitt and
Coburg;[11108] of having excited Vendée to insurrection. The betrayal
of Dumouriez is imputed to them, also the murder of Lepelletier, and the
assassination of Marat; while pretended witnesses, selected from amongst
their personal enemies, come and repeat, like a theme agreed upon, the
same ill-contrived fable: nothing but vague allegations and manifest
falsehoods, not one definite fact, not once convincing document; the
lack of proof is such that the trial has to be stopped as soon as
possible. "You brave b----forming the court," writes Hébert, "don't
trifle away your time. Why so much ceremony in shortening the days of
wretches whom the people have already condemned?" Care is especially
taken not to let them have a chance to speak. The eloquence of
Vergniaud and logic of Guadet might turn the tables at the last
moment. Consequently, a prompt decree authorizes the tribunal to stop
proceedings as soon as the jury becomes sufficiently enlightened, which
is the case after the seventh session of the court, the record of death
suddenly greeting the accused, who are not allowed to defend themselves.
One of them, Valazé, stabs himself in open court, and the next day
the national head-chopper strikes off the remaining twenty heads in
thirty-eight minutes.--Still more expeditious are the proceedings
against the accused who avoid a trial. Gorsas, seized in Paris on
the 8th of October, is guillotined the same day. Birotteau, seized at
Bordeaux, on the 24th of October, mounts the scaffold within twenty-four
hours. The others, tracked like wolves, wandering in disguise from one
hiding-place to another, and most of them arrested in turn, have only
choice of several kinds of death. Cambon is killed in defending himself.
Lidon, after having defended himself, blows out his brains, Condorcet
takes poison in the guard-room of Bourg-la-Reine. Roland kills himself
with his sword on the highway. Clavière stabs himself in prison.
Rébecqui is found drowned in the harbor of Marseilles, and Pétion
and Buzon half eaten by wolves on a moor of Saint-Emilion. Valady is
executed at Périgueux, Dechézeau at Rochefort, Grangeneuve, Guadet,
Salle and Barbaroux at Bordeaux, Coustard, Cussy, Rabout-Saint-Étienne,
Bernard, Masuyer, and Lebrun at Paris. Even those who resigned in
January, 1793, Kersaint and Manuel, atone with their lives for the crime
of having sided with the "Right" and, of course, Madame Roland, who
is taken for the leader of the party, is one of the first to be
guillotined.[11109]--Of the one-hundred and eighty Girondins who led
the Convention, one hundred and forty have perished or are in prison,
or fled under sentence of death. After such a curtailment and such an
example the remaining deputies cannot be otherwise than docile;[11110]
neither in the central nor in the local government will the "Mountain"
encounter resistance; its despotism is practically established, and all
that remains is to proclaim this in legal form.




XI. Institutions of the Revolutionary Government

     Institutions of the Revolutionary Government.--Its
     principle, objects, proceedings, tools and structure.--The
     Committee of Public Safety.--Subordination of the Convention
     and ministry.--The use of the Committee of General Security
     and the Revolutionary Tribunal.--Administrative
     centralization.--Representatives on Mission, National Agents
     and Revolutionary Committees.--Law of Lése-majesty.
     --Restoration and Aggravation of the institutions of the old
     monarchy.

After the 2nd of August, on motion of Bazire, the Convention decrees
"that France is in revolution until its independence is recognized."
which means[11111] that the period of hypocritical phrases has come to
an end, that the Constitution was merely a signboard for a fair, and
that the charlatans who had made use of it no longer need it, that it is
to be put away in the store containing other advertising material, that
individual, local and parliamentary liberties are abolished, that the
government is arbitrary and absolute, that no institution, law, dogma,
or precedent affords any guarantee for it against the rights of the
people, that property and lives are wholly at its mercy, that there are
no longer any rights of man.--Six weeks later, when, through the protest
of the forty-five and the arrest of the seventy-three, obedience to the
Convention is assured, all this is boldly and officially announced in
the tribune. "Under the present circumstances of the Republic," says
St. Just, "the Constitution cannot be implemented as this would enable
attacks on liberty to take place because it would lack the violent
measures necessary to repress these." We are no longer to govern
"according to maxims of natural peace and justice; these maxims are only
valid among the friends of liberty;" but they are not applicable between
patriots and the malevolent. The latter are "outside our sovereignty,"
are lawless, excluded from the social pact, slaves in rebellion, to be
punished or imprisoned, and, amongst the malevolent must be placed
"the indifferent[11112]".--"You are to punish whoever is passive in
the Republic and does nothing for it;" for his passivity is treason and
ranks him among other public enemies. Now, between the people and its
enemies, there is nothing in common but the sword; steel must control
those who cannot be ruled "by justice"; the monarchical and neutral
majority must be repressed (comprimé);

"The Republic will be founded only when the sans-culottes,[11113] the
sole representatives of the nation, the only citizens, "shall rule by
right of conquest."[11114]

The meaning of this is more than clear. The régime of which St. Just
presents the plan, is that by which every oligarchy of invaders installs
and maintains itself over a subjugated nation. Through this régime, in
Greece, ten thousand Spartans, after the Dorian invasion, mastered three
hundred thousand helots and périocques; through this régime, in England,
sixty thousand Normans, after the battle of Hastings, mastered two
million Saxons; through this régime in Ireland, since the battle of the
Boyne, two hundred thousand English Protestants have mastered a million
of Catholic Irish; through this régime, the three hundred thousand
Jacobins of France will master the seven or eight millions of Girondins,
Feuillants, Royalists or Indifferents.

This system of government is a very simple one and consist in
maintaining the subject population in a state of extreme helplessness
and of extreme terror. To this end, it is disarmed;[11115] it is kept
under surveillance; all action in common is prohibited; its eyes should
always be directed to the up-lifted ax and to the prison doors always
open; it is ruined and decimated.--For the past six months all these
rigors are decreed and applied,--disarmament of "suspects," taxes on
the rich, the maximum against traders, requisitions on land-owners,
wholesale arrests, rapid executions of sentences, arbitrary penalties of
death, and publicized, multiplied tortures. For the past six months, all
sorts of executive instruments are set up and put into operation:
The Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security,
ambulating proconsuls with full power, local committees authorized
to tax and imprison at will, a revolutionary army, a revolutionary
tribunal. But, for lack of internal harmony and of central impulsion,
the machine only half works, the power not being sufficient and its
action not sufficiently sweeping and universal.

"You are too remote from the conspiracies against you," says St.
Just;[11116] "it is essential that the sword of the law should
everywhere be rapidly brandished and your arm be everywhere present
to arrest crime.... The ministers confess that, beyond their first
and second subordinates, they find nothing but inertia and
indifference."--"A similar apathy is found in all the government
agents," adds Billaud-Varennes;[11117] "the secondary authorities
which are the strong points of the Revolution serve only to impede it."
Decrees, transmitted through administrative channels, arrive slowly and
are indolently applied. "You are missing that co-active force which
is the principle of being, of action, of execution.... Every good
government should possess a center of willpower and the levers connected
with it.... Every government activity should exclusively originate from
the central source."--

"In ordinary governments," says Couthon, finally,[11118] "the right of
electing belongs to the people; you cannot take it away from them. In
extraordinary governments all impulsion must come from the center; it is
from the convention that elections must issue.... You would injure the
people by confiding the election of officials to them, because you would
expose them to electing men that would betray them."

--The result is that the constitutional maxims of 1789 give way to
radically opposed maxims; instead of subjecting the government to the
people, the people is made subject to the government. The hierarchy
of the ancient régime is re-established under revolutionary terms, and
henceforth all powers, much more formidable than those of the ancient
régime, cease to be delegated from the depths to the summit and will
henceforth instead be delegated from the summit to the bottom.

At the summit, a committee of twelve members, similar to the former
royal council, exercises collective royalty; nominally, authority is
divided amongst the twelve; it is, in practice, concentrated in a few
hands. Several members occupy only a subaltern position, and amongst
these, Barère, who, official secretary and mouthpiece, is always ready
to make a speech or draft an editorial; others, with special functions,
Jean Bon St. André, Lindet, and above all, Prieur de la Côte d'Or and
Carnot, confine themselves each to his particular department, navy, war,
supplies, with blank signatures, for which they give in return their
signatures to the political leaders; the latter, called "the statesmen,"
Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes,
are the real rulers providing overall direction. It is true that their
mandate has to be renewed monthly; but this is a certainty, for, in the
present state of the Convention, its vote, required beforehand, becomes
an almost vain formality. More submissive than the parliament of Louis
XIV., the Convention adopts, without discussion, the decrees which the
Committee of Public Safety present to it ready made. It is no more than
a registry-office, and scarcely that, for it has relinquished its right
of appointing its own committees, that office being assigned to the
Committee of Public Safety; it votes as a whole all lists of names which
the Committee send in.[11119] Naturally, none but the creatures of the
latter and the faithful are inscribed; thus, the whole legislative and
parliamentary power belongs to it.--As to executive and administrative
power, the ministers have become mere clerks of the Committee of Public
Safety; "they come every day at specified hours to receive its orders
and acts;[11120] "they submit to it "the list with explanations, of all
the agents" sent into the departments and abroad; they refer to it
every minute detail; they are its scribes, merely its puppets,
so insignificant that they finally lose their title, and for the
"Commission on External Relations" a former school-master is taken, an
inept clubbist, bar-fly and the pillar of the billiard-room, scarcely
able to read the documents brought to him to sign in the café where he
passes his days.[11121]--Thus is the second power in the State converted
by the Committee into a squad of domestics, while the foremost one is
converted into an audience of claqueurs.

To make them do their duty, it has two hands.--One, the right, which
seizes people unawares by the collar, is the Committee of General
Security, composed of twelve extreme Montagnards, such as Panis, Vadier,
Le Bas, Geoffroy, David, Amar, La Vicomterie, Lebon and Ruhl, all
nominated, that is to say, appointed by it, being its confederates and
subalterns. They are its lieutenants of police, and once a week they
come and take part in its labors, as formerly the Sartines, and
the Lenoirs assisted the Comptroller-general. A man who this secret
committee deems a "suspect," is suddenly seized, no matter who, whether
representative, minister, or general, and finds himself the next morning
behind the bars in one of the ten new Bastilles.--There, the other
hand seizes him by the throat; this is the revolutionary tribunal, an
exceptional court like the extraordinary commissions of the ancient
régime, only far more terrible. Aided by its police gang, the
Committee of Public Safety itself selects the sixteen judges and sixty
jurymen[11122] from among the most servile, the most furious, or the
most brutal of the fanatics:[11123] Fouquier-Tinville, Hermann, Dumas,
Payan, Coffinhal, Fleuriot-Lescot, and, lower down on the scale,
apostate priests, renegade nobles, disappointed artists, infatuated
studio-apprentices, journeymen scarcely able to write their names,
shoemakers, joiners, carpenters, tailors, barbers, former lackeys,
an idiot like Ganney, a deaf man like Leroy-Dix-Août; their names and
professions indicate all that is necessary to be told: these men are
licensed and paid murderers. The Jurymen themselves are allowed eighteen
francs a day, so that they may attend to their business more leisurely.
This business consists in condemning without proof, without any
pleadings, and scarcely any examination, in a hurry, in batches,
whoever the Committee of Public Safety might send to them, even the most
confirmed Montagnards: Danton, who contrived the tribunal, will soon
discover this.--it is through these two government institutions that the
Committee of Public Safety keeps every head under the cleaver and each
head, to avoid being struck off, bows down,[11124] in the provinces as
well as in Paris.

This has happened when the existing local hierarchy was replaced by
new authorities making the omnipotent will of the Committee present
everywhere. Directly or indirectly, "for all government measures or
measures of public safety, all that relates to persons and the
general and internal police, all constituted bodies and all public
functionaries, are placed under its inspection."[11125] You may imagine
how the risk of being guillotined weighed upon them.

To suppress in advance any tendency to administrative inertia, it has
had withdrawn from the too powerful, too much respected, department
governments, "too inclined to federalism," their departmental dominance
and their "political influence."[11126] It reduces these to the levying
of taxes and the supervision of roads and canals; it purges them out
through its agents; it even purges out the governments of municipalities
and districts. To suppress beforehand all probability of popular
opposition, it has had the sessions of the sections reduced to two
per week; it installs in these sections, for about forty sous a day,
a majority of sans-culottes; it orders the suspension "until further
directives" of all municipal elections.[11127]

Finally, to have full control on the spot, it appoints its own men,
first, the commissioners and the representatives on missions, a sort of
temporary corps of directors sent into each department with unlimited
powers;[11128] next, a body of national agents, a sort of permanent
body of sub-delegates, through whom in each district and municipality it
replaces the procureurs-syndics.[11129] To this army of functionaries is
added in each town, bourg or large village, a revolutionary committee,
paid three francs a day per member, charged with the application of its
decrees, and required to make reports thereon. Never before was such
a vast and closely woven network cast from above to envelope and keep
captive twenty-six million people. Such is the real constitution which
the Jacobins substitute for the constitution they have prepared for
show. In the arsenal of the monarchy which they destroyed they took the
most despotic institutions--centralization, Royal Council, lieutenants
of police, special tribunals, intendants and sub-delegates; they
disinterred the antique Roman law of lèse-majesty, refurbished old
blades which civilization had dulled, aiming them at every throat and
now wielded at random against liberties, property and lives. It is
called the "revolutionary government;" according to official statements
it is to last until peace is secured; in the minds of genuine Jacobins
it must continue until all the French have been regenerated in
accordance with the formula.


*****

[Footnote 1101: Titus Flavious Clemens, (Greek writer born in Athens
around 150 and dead in Cappadoce in 250) He lived in Alexandria. (SR).]

[Footnote 1102: The words of Marat.]

[Footnote 1103: After the Constitution is completed, said Legendre, in
the Jacobin club, we will make the federalists dance.]

[Footnote 1104: Archives Nationales, F.I.C.. 56, (Circular of Gohier,
Minister of Justice, to the French people, July 6, 1793). "Certain
persons are disposed to pervert the events of May 31 and June 2,
by atrocious exaggerations and the grossest fables, and prevent the
fortunate results they present from being seen. They are absolutely
determined to see nothing but violations of the liberty of the people's
representatives in a step which was specially designed to hasten on the
Constitutional Act on which the liberty of all is established. Of what
consequence is it who are the authors of the Constitution presented
to you? What does it matter whether it issues from a mountain amidst
lightning and the rolling thunder, like the Tables of the Law given
to the Hebrews, or whether it comes, like the laws given to the early
Romans, inspired in the tranquil asylum of a divinity jealous of his
religious surroundings? Is this constitution worthy of a free people?
That is the only question which citizens who wear the livery of no party
need examine!"]

[Footnote 1105: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 177. (report by Hérault
Séchelles, June 10, 1793). Ibid, XXXI., 400. (Text of constitution
submitted to discussion June 11th, and passed June 24th.)]

[Footnote 1106: De Sybel, II., 331. (According to the facsimile
published in the Quarterly Review). "Hérault says that he and four of
his colleagues are ordered to furnish the draft of a constitution by
Monday."]

[Footnote 1107: Report by Hérault-Séchelles. (Buchez et Roux, XXVIII.
178.)]

[Footnote 1108: Buchez et Roux, XXXI, 400. (Articles of the Declaration
of Rights, 1, 7, 9, 11, 27, 31, 35)]

[Footnote 1109: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 178. Report by
Hérault-Séchelles. "Each of us had the same desire, that of attaining
to the greatest democratic result. The sovereignty of the people and the
dignity of man were constantly in our minds... A secret sentiment tells
us that our work is perhaps the most popular that ever existed."]

[Footnote 1110: Archives Nationales, B. II., 23. (Table of votes by the
commission appointed to collect the procès-verbaux of the adoption
of the constitution, August 20, 1793.)--Number of primary assemblies
sending in their procès-verbaux, 6,589 (516 cantons have not yet sent
theirs in).--Number of voters on call, 1,795,908; Yes, 1,784,377; Noes,
11,531.--Number of primary assemblies voting Yes unanimously, not on
call of names, 297.--At Paris, 40,990 voters, at Troyes, 2,491, at
Limoges, 2,137.--Cf. For details and motives of abstention, Sauzay IV.
pp. 157-161. Albert Babeau, II, pp. 83 and 84. Moniteur, XVII., 375
(speech by the representative Desvars).]

[Footnote 1111: Ibid., Moniteur, XVII., 20. (report by Barrère on
the convocation of the primary assemblies, June 17, 1793.) Ibid., 102
(Report of Cambon, July 11). "It is now a fortnight since you demanded a
Constitution. Very well, here it is.... Respect for persons and
property is amply secured in it. Yes, more definitely than in any other
constitution. Does it provide for its own revision? Yes, for in six
weeks, we can convoke the primary assemblies and express our desire
for the reform that may appear necessary.--Will the popular wish be
respected? Yes, the people then will make definitive laws."]

[Footnote 1112: Guillon de Montléon, I., 282, 309.--Buchez et Roux,
XXVIII, 356, 357 (Journal de Lyon Nos. 223 and 224.) "The acceptance of
the Constitution was neither entire nor very sincere; people took credit
to themselves for accepting a vicious and sketchy production." Meillan,
"Mémoires," 120. (In July he leaves Caen for Quimper). "Although we
were assured that we should pass only through Maratist towns, we had the
satisfaction of finding nearly all the inhabitants regarding Marat
with horror. They had indeed accepted the Constitution offered by
the Committee of Public Safety, but solely to end the matter and on
conditions which would speak well for them; for, everywhere the renewal
of the Convention was exacted and the punishment of assaults made
on it." This desire, and others analogous to it, are given in the
procès-verbaux of many of the primary assemblies (Archives Nationales,
B. II., 23); for example, in those of the thirteen cantons of Ain. A
demand is made, furthermore, for the reintegration of the Twenty-two,
the abolition of the revolutionary tribunal, the suppression of absolute
proconsulates, the organization of a department guard for securing the
future of the Convention, the discharge of the revolutionary army, etc.]

[Footnote 1113: Moniteur, XVII., 20. Report of Barère: "The
Constitutional act is going to draw the line between republicans and
royalists."]

[Footnote 1114: Archives Nationales, F.I.C., 54. (Circular of the
Minister, Gohier, July 6, 1793.) "It is to-day that, summoned to the
alter of the country, those who desire the Republic will be known by
name, and those who do not desire it, whether they speak or keep silent,
will be equally known."]

[Footnote 1115: Sauzay, IV., 160, 161. (Article by the Vidette.)
Consequently, "all the unconstitutionalists nobles and priests
considered it a duty to go the assemblies and joyfully accept a
constitution which guaranteed liberty and property to everybody."]

[Footnote 1116: "Journal des Débats de la Société des Jacobins," No. For
July 27, 1793 (correspondence, No. 122).]

[Footnote 1117: Moniteur, XVII., 156, 163.]

[Footnote 1118: Sauzay, IV., 158: "The motives for judgments were thus
stated by judges themselves."]

[Footnote 1119: Moniteur, XVII., 40, 48, 72, 140, 175, 194, 263.
(Cf. Speeches by Chaumette, July 14, and Report by Gossoin, August
9).--Archives Nationales, B. II., 23. Negative votes in Ardèche 5, in
Aude 5, Moselle 5, Saône-et-Loire 5, Côte-d'Or 4, Creuse 4, Haut-Rhin
4, Gers 4, Haute-Garonne 3, Aube 2, Bouches-du-Rhône 2, Cantal 2,
Basses-Alpes 1, Haute-Marne 1, Haute-Vienne 1, Var 0, Seine 0.--The
details and circumstances of voting are curious. In the department
of Aube, at Troyes, the second section in agreement with the third,
excluded "suspects" from the vote. At Paris, the section "Gardes
Française," Fourcroy president, announces 1,714 voters, of which 1,678
are citizens and 36 citoyennes. In the "Mont Blanc" section, the
secretary signs as follows: Trone segretaire general de la semblé.]

[Footnote 1120: Moniteur, XVII., 375. (Session of the convention, August
11, 1793). Chabot: "I demand a law requiring every man who does not
appear at a primary meeting to give good reason for his absence;
also, that any man who has not favored the Constitution, be declared
ineligible to all constitutional franchises." Ibid., 50. (Meeting of the
Commune, July 4th). Leonard Bourdon demands, in the name of his section,
the Gravilliers, a register on which to inscribe those who accept
the Constitution, "in order that those who do not vote for it may be
known."--Souzay, IV. 159. M. Boillon, of Belleherbe, is arrested "for
being present at the primary assembly of the canton of Vaucluse, and
when called upon to accept the Constitutional act, leaving without
voting."]

[Footnote 1121: Moniteur, XVII., 11. (Instructions on the mode of
accepting the Constitution).--Sauzay IV., 158.--Moniteur, XVII., 302.
(Speech by Garat, August 2.) "I have dispatched commissioners to push
the Constitutional Act through the primary assemblies."--Durand-
Maillane. 150. "The envoys of the departments were taken from the
sans-culotterie then in fashion, because they ruled in the Convention."]

[Footnote 1122: Sauzay, IV., 158.]

[Footnote 1123: Moniteur, XVII., 363. (Report of Gossuin to the
Convention, August 9). "There are primary assemblies which have extended
their deliberations beyond the acceptance of the Constitution. This
acceptance being almost unanimous, all other objects form matter for
petitions to be entrusted to competent committees."--Ibid., 333.
(Speech of Delacroix). "The anti-revolutionary delegates sent by the
conspirators we had in the Convention must be punished. (August 6.).]

[Footnote 1124: Moniteur, ibid., 333. Speech and motions of Bazire,
August 8.--XIX., 116. Report of Vouland, January 2, 1794. The pay
of Maillard and his acolytes amounted to twenty-two thousand
livres.--XVIII., 324. (Session of August 5. Speeches of Gossuin,
Thibault and Lacroix.)--Ibid., 90. (Session of Germinal 8, year III.)
Speech by Bourdon de l'Oise: "We have been obliged to pick men out of
the envoys in order to find those disposed for rigorous measures."]

[Footnote 1125: Moniteur, XVII., 330. Ordinance of the Commune, August
6.]

[Footnote 1126: Moniteur, XVII., 332. (Session of the Convention, August
6.)--Cf. the "Diurnal" of Beaulieu, August 6. Beaulieu mentions several
deputations and motions of the same order, and states the alarm of the
"Mountain."--Durand-Maillane, "Mémoires," 151. "Among the envoys from
the departments were sensible men who, far from approving of all the
steps taken by their brethren, entertained and manifested very contrary
sentiments. These were molested and imprisoned."--"Archives des Affaires
étrangères," vol. 1411. (Report of the agents of August 10 and 11.) The
department commissioners... seemed to us in the best disposition. There
are some intriguers among them, however; we are following up some of
them, and striving by fraternizing with them to prevent them from being
seduced or led away by the perfidious suggestions of certain
scoundrels, the friends of federalism, amongst them.... A few patriotic
commissioners have already denounced several of their brethren accused
of loving royalty and federalism."]


[Footnote 1127: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 408.]

[Footnote 1128: Moniteur., XVII., 330. (Act passed by the Commune,
August 6.)]

[Footnote 1129: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. 1411. (Reports of
agents, Aug. 10 and 11). "Citizens are, to-day, eager to see who shall
have a commissioner at his table: who shall treat him the best. .. the
Commissioners of the primary assemblies come and fraternise with them in
the Jacobin club. They adopt their maxims, and are carried away by the
energy of the good and true republican sans-culottes in the clubs."]

[Footnote 1130: Moniteur, XVII., 307, 308. (Report of Couthon to
the Convention, Aug. 2.) "You would wound, you would outrage these
Republicans, were you to allow the performance before them of an
infinity of pieces filled with insulting allusions to liberty."]

[Footnote 1131: Ibid. 124. (Session of Aug. 5.)]

[Footnote 1132: Ibid., 314; (Letter of Lhuillier, Aug. 4.)--322,
Session of the Commune, Aug. 4th; 332, (Session of the Convention, Aug.
6).--Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 409. (Meeting of the Jacobin Club, Aug.
5th).]

[Footnote 1133: Buchez et Roux, 411 (Article in the Journal de la
Montagne.)]

[Footnote 1134: Moniteur, XVII., 348.]

[Footnote 1135: "Le Féderation" was in 1790 "the Association of the
National Guards." (SR).]

[Footnote 1136: Buchez et Roux, XVIII., 415 and following pages.]

[Footnote 1137: Ibid., 352.--Cf. Beaulieu, "Diurnal," Aug. 9.]

[Footnote 1138: On the mechanical character of the festivals of the
Revolution read the programme of "The civic fete in honor of Valor and
Morals," ordered by Fouché at Nevers, on the 1st day of the 1st decade
of the 2nd month of the year II. (De Martel, "Etude sur Fouché,"
202); also, the programme of the "Fete de l'Etre Supréme," at Sceaux,
organized by the patriot Palloy, Presidial 20, year II. (Dauban, Paris
en 1794, p.187).]

[Footnote 1139: It cost one million two hundred thousand francs, besides
the traveling expenses of eight thousand delegates.]

[Footnote 1140: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 439, and following pages.
Procès verbal of he National Festival of the 10th of August.--Dauban "La
Demagogie en 1791." (Extract from the Republican Ritual.)]

[Footnote 1141: Moniteur, XVII., 366. (Session of Aug. 11. Speech by
Lacroix and decree in conformity therewith.)]

[Footnote 1142: Ibid., 374. "Remember that you are accountable to the
nation and the universe for this sacred Ark. Remember that it is your
duty to die rather than suffer a sacrilegious hand....."]

[Footnote 1143: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 358. It is evident from the
context of the speech that Robespierre and the Jacobins were desirous of
maintaining the Convention because they foresaw Girondist elections.]

[Footnote 1144: Moniteur, XVII., 382. (Session of Aug. 12. Speech by
Lacroix).]

[Footnote 1145: Ibid., 387.--Cf. Ibid., 410, session of August 16. The
delegates return there to insist on a levy, en masse, the levy of the
first class not appearing sufficient to them. (levy means mobilization
of all men)--Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 464. Delegate Royer, Curé of
Chalons-sur-Saone, demands that the aristocrats "chained together in
sixes" be put in the front rank in battle "to avoid the risks of sauve
qui peut."]

[Footnote 1146: Decrees of August 14 and 16.]

[Footnote 1147: Moniteur, XVII., 375.]

[Footnote 1148: Riouffe, "Mémoires," 19: "An entire generation, the
real disciples of Jean-Jacques, Voltaire and Diderot, could be, and was
annihilated, to a large extent under the pretext of federalism."]

[Footnote 1149: Moniteur, XVII., 102. (Speech by Cambon, July 11, 1793).
Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Speech of General Wimpffen to
the "Société des amis de la Liberté et de l'Egalité," in session at
Cherbourg, June 25, 1793). "Sixty-four departments have already revoked
the powers conferred on their representatives." Meillan, "Mémoires," 72:
"The archives of Bordeaux once contained the acts passed by seventy-two
departments, all of which adhered to measures nearly the same as those
indicted in our documents."]

[Footnote 1150: Buchez et Roux, XVIII., 148.--Meillan, 70, 71.--Guillon
de Montléon, I., 300 (on Lyons) and I., 280 (on Bordeaux). Archives
Nationales, AF II., 46. (Deliberations of the Nantes section July
5).--Letter of Merlin and Gillet, representatives on mission, Lorient,
June 12. Dissatisfaction at the outrages of May 31 and June 2, was so
manifest that the representatives on mission Merline, Gillet, Savestre,
and Cagaignac print on the 14th of June a resolution authorising one of
their body to go to the Convention and protest "in their name" against
the weakness shown by it and against the ursurpations of the Paris
commune.--Sauzay, IV., 260. At Besançon, in a general assembly of all
the administrative, judicial and municipal bodies of the department
joined to the commissioners of the section, protest "unanimously" on the
15th of June.]

[Footnote 1151: Archives Nationales, Ibid.(Letter of Romme and Prieur,
Caen, June 10th, to the committee of Public Safety). The insurgents are
so evidently in the right that Romme and Prieur approve of their
own arrest. "Citizens, our colleagues, this arrest may be of great
importance, serve the cause of liberty, maintain the unity of the
republic and revive confidence if, as we hasten to demand it of you, you
confirm it by a decree which declares us hostages.... We have noticed
that among the people of Caen, there is a love of liberty, as well as of
justice and docility."]

[Footnote 1152: Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Printed July 5).
Result of the deliberations of the Nantes sections. The act is signed
by the three administrative bodies of Nantes, by the district rulers of
Clisson, Anceries and Machecoul, who had fled to Nantes, and by both
the deputies of the districts of Paimboeuf and Chateaubriand, in all,
eighty-six signatures.]

[Footnote 1153: Archives Nationales, ibid., (letter of General Wimpffen
to the "Societé des Amis de l'Egalité et de la Liberté" in session
at Cherbourg, June 25, 1793).--Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 126.--On the
opinion of the departments cf. Paul Thibaud ("Etudes sur l'histoire
de Grenoble et du Department de l'Isére").--Louis Guibert ("Le Parti
Girondin dans le Haute Vienne").--Jarrin, ("Bourg et Bellay pendant la
Révolution").]

[Footnote 1154: Albert Babeau, II., 83. (Pamphlet by the curé of
Cleray). "Every primary assembly that accepts the Constitution strikes
the factions a blow on the head with the club of Hercules."]

[Footnote 1155: Cf. "The Revolution," Vol. II. Ch. XI.]

[Footnote 1156: Buzot.--Archives Nationales, AF. II., 157. Reports by
Baudot and Ysabeau to the Convention. The 19th of Aug. At the Hotel de
Ville of Bordeaux, they eulogize the 21st of January: "There was then a
roar as frightful as it was general. A city official coolly replied to
us: What would you have? To oppose anarchy we have been forced to join
the aristocrats, and they rule." Another says ironically to Ysabeau: "We
did not anticipate that,--they are our tribunes."]

[Footnote 1157: Jarrin, "Bourg et Belley pendant la Révolution"
("Annales de la Societé d'Emulation de l'Ain," 1878, Nos. For January,
February and March, p. 16).]

[Footnote 1158: Louvet, 103, 108.--Guillon de Montléon, I., 305 and
following pages.--Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 151. (Report of the delegates
of the district of Andelys). "One of members observed that there would
be a good deal of trouble in raising an armed force of one thousand
men."--An administrator (a commissioner of Calvados) replied: "We shall
have all the aristocrats on our side." The principal military leaders
at Caen and at Lyons, Wimpffen, Précy, Puisaye, are Feuillants and form
only a provisional alliance with the Girondists properly so called,
Hence constant contentions and reciprocal mistrust. Birotteau and
Chapet leave Lyons because they do not find the spirit of the place
sufficiently republican.]

[Footnote 1159: Louvet, 124, 129.--Buchez et Roux, XXVII, 360. (Notice
by General Wimpffen), July 7.--Puisaye, "Mémoires" and "L'Insurrection
Normande." by et Vaultier et Mancel.]

[Footnote 1160: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 471. Letter of Barbaroux, Caen,
June 18.--Ibid., 133. Letter of Madame Roland to Buzot, July 7. "You are
not the one to march at the head of battalions (departmental). It would
have the appearance of gratifying personal vengeance."]

[Footnote 1161: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 153. (Deliberations of the
constituted authorities of Marseilles, June 7.)]

[Footnote 1162: Guillon de Montléon, II., 40. The contrast between the
two parties is well shown in the following extract from the letter of a
citizen of Lyons to Kellerman's soldiers. "They tell you that we want
to destroy the unity of the republic, while they themselves abandon the
frontiers to the enemy in order to come here and cut their brethren's
throats."]

[Footnote 1163: Guillon de Montléon, I., 288.--Marcelin Boudet, "Les
Conventionnels d'Auvergne," p. 181.--Louvet, 193.--Moniteur, XVII., 101.
(Speech of Cambon, July 11). "We have preferred to expose these
funds (one hundred and five millions destined for the army) to being
intercepted, rather than to retard this dispatch. The first thing the
Committee of Public Safety have had to care for was to save the republic
and make the administrations fully responsible for it. They were fully
aware of this, and accordingly have allowed the circulation of these
funds... They have been forced, through the wise management of the
Committee, to contribute themselves to the safety of the republic."]

[Footnote 1164: Archives Nationales, Letter of Robert Lindet, June 16,
AF. II., 43. The correspondence of Lindet, which is very interesting,
well shows the sentiments of the Lyonnese and the policy of the
"Mountain." "However agitated Lyons may be, order prevails; nobody wants
either king or tyrant; all use the same language: the words republic,
union, are in everybody's mouth." (Eight letters.) He always gives the
same advice to the Committee of Public Safety: "Publish a constitution,
publish the motives of the bills of arrest," which are indispensable to
rally everybody to the Convention, (June 15).]


[Footnote 1165: Guillon de Montléon, I., 309 (July 24).]

[Footnote 1166: Sauzay, IV., 268.--Paul Thibaud, 50.--Marcelin Boudet,
185.--Archives Nationales AF. II., 46. Extract from the registers of the
Council of the department of Loire-Inferieure, July 14. The department
protests that its decree of July 5 was not "a rupture with the
Convention, an open rebellion against the laws of the State, an idea
very remote from the sentiments and intentions of the citizens present."
Now, "the plan of a Constitution is offered to the acceptance of the
sovereign. This fortunate circumstance should bring people to one
mind, and, with hope thus renewed, let us at once seize on the means
of salvation thus presented to us."--Moniteur, XVII., 102. (Speech of
Cambon, July 11.)]

[Footnote 1167: Louvet, 119, 128, 150, 193.--Meillan, 130, 141. (On
the disposition and sentiments of the provinces and of the public
in general, the reader will find ample and authentic details in the
narratives of the fugitives who scattered themselves in all directions,
and especially those of Louvet, Meillan, Dulaure, and Vaublanc.) Cf.
the "Mémoires de Hua" and "Un Séjour en France in 1792 and
1795."--Mallet-du-Pan already states this disposition before 1789 (MS.
Journal). "June, 1785: The French live simply in a crowd; they must all
cling together. On the promenades they huddle together and jostle each
other in one alley; the same when there is more space." "Aug., 1787,
(after the first riots): I have remarked in general more curiosity
than excitement in the multitude.... One can judge, at this moment, the
national character; a good deal of bravado and nonsense; neither reason,
rule nor method; rebellious in crowds, and not a soul that does not
tremble in the presence of a corporal."]

[Footnote 1168: Meillan, 143.--Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 203. (Session of
August 10).--Mallet-du-Pan, "Mémoires," II., 9.]

[Footnote 1169: Ernest Daudet, "His. des Conspirations royalistes dans
le midi." (Books II. And III.)]

[Footnote 1170: Guillon de Montléon, I., 313. (Address of a Lyonais to
the patriot soldiers under Kellerman.)]

[Footnote 1171: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 222.--The insurrection of
Toulon, Girondist at the start, dates July 1st.--Letter of the new
administrators of Toulon to the Convention. "W desire the Republic,
one and indivisible; there is no sign of rebellion with us...
Representatives Barras and Fréron lie shamefully in depicting us as
anti-revolutionaries, on good terms with the English and the families of
Vendée."--The Toulon administrators continue furnishing the Italian army
with supplies. July 19, an English boat, sent to parley, had to lower
the white flag and hoist the tri-color flag. The entry of the English
into Toulon did not take place before the 29th of August.]

[Footnote 1172: Guillon de Montléon, II., 67. (Letter of the Lyonnese to
the representatives of the people, Sep. 20): "The people of Lyons have
constantly respected the laws, and if, as in some departments, that of
Rhone-et-Loire was for a moment mistaken in the events of May 31,
they hastened, as soon as they believed that the Convention was not
oppressed, to recognize and execute its decrees. Every day, now that
these reach it, they are published and observed within its walls."]

[Footnote 1173: Moniteur, XVII., 269. (Session of July 28). (Letter
of the administrators of the department of Rhone-et-Loire to the
Convention, Lyons, July 24). "We present to the Convention our
individual recantation and declaration; in conforming to the law we
are entitled to its protection. We petition the court to decide on
our declaration, and to repeal the acts which relate to us or make an
exception in our favor... We have always professed ourselves to be true
republicans."]

[Footnote 1174: Guillon de Montléon, I., 309, 311, 315,
335.--Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 197.]

[Footnote 1175: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 141.]

[Footnote 1176: Mallet du Pan, I., 379 and following pages; I., 408;
II., 10.]

[Footnote 1177: Entry of the Republican troops into Lyons, October
9th, into Toulon, December 19th.--Bordeaux had submitted on the 2nd of
August. Exasperated by the decree of the 6th which proscribed all the
abettors of the insurrection, the city drives out, on the 19th, the
representatives Baudot and Ysabeau. It submits again on the 19th of
September. But so great is the indignation of the citizens, Tallien
and his three colleagues dare not enter before the 16th of October.
(Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 197 and following pages.)]

[Footnote 1178: Seventy thousand men were required to reduce Lyons,
(Guillon de Montléon, II., 226) and sixty thousand men to reduce
Toulon.]

[Footnote 1179: Archives des Affaires étrangères, vol. CCCXXIX.
(Letter of Chépy, political agent, Grenoble, July 26, 1793). "I say it
unhesitatingly, I had rather reduce Lyons than save Valenciennes."]

[Footnote 1180: Ibid., vol. CCCXXIX. (Letter of Chépy, Grenoble, August
24, 1793): "The Piedmontese are masters of Cluse. A large body of
mountaineers have joined them. At Annecy the women have cut down
the liberty pole and burnt the archives of the club and commune. At
Chambéry, the people wanted to do the same, but they forced the sick in
the hospitals to take arms and thus kept them down."]

[Footnote 1181: Moniteur, XVIII, 474. (Report of Billaud-Varennes,
October 18, 1793). "The combined efforts of all the powers of Europe
have not compromised liberty and the country so much as the federalist
factions; the assassin the most to be dreaded is the one that lives in
the house."]

[Footnote 1182: The convention purposely reinstates incendiaries and
assassins. (Moniteur, XVIII., 483. Session of Breumaire 28, year II.):
XVII., 176. (Session of July 19, 1793). Rehabilitation of Bordier and
Jourdain, hung in August, 1789. Cancelling of the proceedings begun
against the authors of the massacre of Melun (September, 1792) and
release of the accused.--Cf. Albert Babeau, (I., 277.) Rehabilitation,
with indemnities distributed in Messidor, year II, to their
relatives.--"Archives des Affaires étrangères," vol. 331. (Letter of
Chépy, Grenoble, Frimaire 8, year II). "The criminal court and jury of
the department have just risen to the height of the situation; they have
acquitted the castle-burners."]

[Footnote 1183: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 593. (Deputation of twenty-four
sections sent from Bordeaux to the Convention, August 30).--Buchez
et Roux, XXVIII., 494. (Report of the representatives on mission in
Bouches-du-Rhône, September 2nd).--Ibid., XXX., 386. (Letter of Rousin,
commandant of the revolutionary army at Lyons. "A population of one
hundred twenty thousand souls..... There are not amongst all these, one
thousand five hundred patriots, even one thousand five hundred persons
that one could spare."--Guillon de Montléon, I., 355, 374. (Signatures of
twenty thousand Lyonnese of all classes, August 17th).]

[Footnote 1184: Guillon de Montléon, I., 394. (Letter of Dubois-Crancé
to the Lyonnese, August 19th.)]

[Footnote 1185: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 198. (Decree of Aug.
6.)--Buchez et Roux, XXVIII. 297, (Decree of July 12.).--Guillon de
Montléon, I., 342. Summons of Dubois-Crancé, Aug. 8.)]

[Footnote 1186: Meillan, 142.).--"Archives des Affaires Etrangéres,"
vol. CCCXXXII. (Letter of Desgranges, Bordeaux, Brumaire 8, year II.):
"The execution of Mayor Saige, who was much loved by the people for his
benefactions, caused much sorrow: but no guilty murmur was heard."]

[Footnote 1187: Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Letter of Julien to
the Committee of Public Safety Messidor 11, year II). "Some time ago a
solemn silence prevailed at the sessions of the military commission, the
people's response to the death-sentences against conspirators; the same
silence attended them to the scaffold; the whole commune seemed to sob
in secret at their fate."]

[Footnote 1188: Berryat Saint-Prix, "La Justice Révolutionaire," pp.
277-299.--Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. (Registers of the Com. Of
Surveillance, Bordeaux). The number of prisoners between Prairial 21 and
28, varies from 1504 to 1529. Number of the guillotined, 882. (Memoirs
of Sénart).]

[Footnote 1189: Archives Nationales, AF. II., 46. Letter of Julien,
Messidor 12, year II. "A good deal has been stolen here; the mayor, now
in prison, is informed of considerable losses. The former Committee of
surveillance came under serious suspicion; many people who were outlawed
only escaped by paying: it is a fact that... Of a number of those who
have thus purchased their lives there are some who did not deserve to
die and who, nevertheless, were threatened with death."--Buchez et Roux,
XXXII., 428. (Extracts from the Memoirs of Sénart). "The president of
the military commission was a man named Lacombe, already banished from
the city on account of a judgment against him for robbery. The other
individuals employed by Tallien comprised a lot of valets, bankrupts and
sharpers."]

[Footnote 1190: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 493. (Speech by Danton, August
31, and decree in conformity therewith by the Convention).]

[Footnote 1191: Mallet-Dupan, II., 17. "Thousands of traders in
Marseilles and Bordeaux, here the respectable Gradis and there the
Tarteron, have been assassinated and their goods sold. I have seen the
thirty-second list only of the Marseilles emigres, whose property has
been confiscated.... There are twelve thousand of them and the lists are
not yet complete." (Feb. 1, 1794.)--Anne Plumptre.2A Narrative of Three
years' Residence in France, from 1802 to 1805." "During this period the
streets of Marseilles were almost those of a deserted town. One could go
from one end of the town to the other without meeting any one he could
call an inhabitant. The great terrorists, of whom scarcely one was a
Marseillaise, the soldiers and roughs as they called themselves, were
almost the only persons encountered. The latter, to the number of fifty
or sixty, in jackets with leather straps, fell upon all whom they did
not like, and especially on anybody with a clean shirt and white cravat.
Many persons on the "Cours" were thus whipped to death. No women went
out-doors without a basket, while every man wore a jacket, without which
they were taken for aristocrats." (II., 94.)]

[Footnote 1192: "Mémoires de Fréron." (Collection Barrière and
Berville). Letters of Fréron to Moise Bayle, Brumaire 23, Pluviose 5 and
11, Novose 16, II, published by Moise Bayle, also details furnished
by Huard, pp. 350-365.--Archives Nationales, AF. II., 144. (Order of
representatives Fréron, Barras, Salicetti and Richard, Novose 17, year
II.)]

[Footnote 1193: Mallet-Dupan, II., 17.--Guillon de Montléon, II., 259.]

[Footnote 1194: Ibid., II., 281. (Decree of the Convention, Oct. 12);
II. 312. (Orders of Couthon and his colleagues, Oct. 25); II., 366-372
(Instructions of the temporary commission, Brumaire 26).]

[Footnote 1195: Ibid. III., 153-156. Letter of Laporte to Couthon, April
13, 1794.]

[Footnote 1196: The contemporary French Encyclopedia "QUID" ed. Lafont,
1996 states on page 755 that according to Louis Marie Prudhomme there
were 31 000 victims at Lyons. (SR.)]

[Footnote 1197: Ibid. II. 135-137. (Resolutions of the Revolutionary
Commission, Germinal 17.) and Letters of Cadillot to Robespierre,
Floréal, year II). III., 63.]

[Footnote 1198: Guillon de Montléon, II., 399. (Letter of Perrotin,
member of the temporary commission to the revolutionary committee of
Moulin.) "The work before the new commission may be considered as an
Organization of the Septembrisade; the process will be the same but
legalized by an act passed."]

[Footnote 1199: Buchez et Roux, XXIX., 192. (Decree of October 12).]

[Footnote 11100: Ibid., XXX., 457. (Decree of November 23).]

[Footnote 11101: "Mémoires de Fréron." (Letter of Fréron, Nivose
6).--Guillon de Montléon, II., 391.]

[Footnote 11102: Decrees of October 12 and December 24.--Archives
Nationales, AF. II., 44. The representatives on mission wanted to do the
same thing with Marseilles. (Orders of Fréron, Barras, Salicetti, and
Ricard, Nivôse 17, year II.) "The name of Marseilles, still borne by
this criminal city, shall be changed. The National Convention shall be
requested to give it another name. Meanwhile it shall remain nameless
and be thus known." In effect, in several subsequent documents,
Marseilles is called the nameless commune.]

[Footnote 11103: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 204. (Session of June 24:
"Strong expressions of dissent are heard on the right." Legendre,
"I demand that the first rebel, the first man there (pointing to the
"Right" party) who interrupts the speaker, be sent to the Abbaye."
Couhey, indeed, was sent to the Abbaye for applauding a Federalist
speech.--Cf. on these three months.--Mortimer-Ternaux, vol. VIII.]

[Footnote 11104: Buchez et Roux, XXIX., 175.--Dauban: "La Démagogie à
Paris en 1793," 436 (Narrative by Dulaure, an eye-witness).]

[Footnote 11105: There were really only twenty-two brought before the
revolutionary tribunal.]

[Footnote 11106: Dauban, XXVI., p. 440. (Narrative of Blanqui, one of
the seventy-three.)]

[Footnote 11107: Buchez et Roux. XXIX., 178, 179. Osselin: "I demand the
decree of accusation against them all."--Amar: "The apparently negative
conduct of the minority of the Convention since the 2nd of June, was
a new plot devised by Barbaroux." Robespierre: "If there are other
criminals among those you have placed under arrest the Committee of
General Security will present to you the nomenclature of them and you
will always be at liberty to strike."]

[Footnote 11108: Ibid., XXIX., 432, 437, 447.--Report by Amar. (this
report served as the bill of indictment against them, "cowardly
satellites of royal despotism, vile agents of foreign tyrants."--Wallon,
II., 407, 409. (Letter of Fouquier-Tinville to the convention). "After
the special debates, will not each of the accused demand a general
prosecution? The trial, accordingly, will be interminable. Besides,
one may ask why should there be witnesses? The convention, all France,
accuses those on trial. The evidence of their crimes is plain; everybody
is convinced of their guilt.... It is the Convention which must
remove all formalities that interfere with the course pursued by the
tribunal."--Moniteur, XVII., (Session of October 28), 291. The decree
provoked by a petition of Jacobins, is passed on motion of Osselin,
aggravated by Robespierre.]

[Footnote 11109: Louvet, "Mémoires," 321. (List of the Girondists who
perished or who were proscribed. Twenty-four fugitives survived.)]

[Footnote 11110: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 395, 416, 435. The terror and
disgust of the majority is seen in the small number of voters. Their
abstention from voting is the more significant in relation to the
election of the dictators. The members of the Committee of Public
Safety, elected on the 16th of July, obtain from one hundred to one
hundred and ninety-two votes. The members of the Committee of Security
obtain from twenty-two to one hundred and thirteen votes. The members
of the same committee, renewed on the 11th of September, obtain
from fifty-two to one hundred and eight votes. The judges of the
revolutionary tribunal, completed on the 3rd of August, obtain from
forty-seven to sixty-five votes.--Meillan, 85. (In relation to the
institution of the revolutionary government, on motion of Bazire, Aug.
28). "Sixty or eighty deputies passed this decree... it was preceded by
another passed by a plurality of thirty against ten. .. For two months
the session the best attended, contains but one hundred deputies. The
Montagnards overran the departments to deceive or intimidate the people.
The rest, discouraged, keep away from the meetings or take no part in
the proceedings."]

[Footnote 11111: The meaning and motives of this declaration are clearly
indicated in Bazire's speech. "Since the adoption of the Constitution,"
he says, "Feuillantism has raised its head; a struggle has arisen
between energetic and moderate patriots. At the end of the Constituent
Assembly, the Feuillants possessed themselves of the words law, order,
public, peace, security, to enchain the zeal of the friends of freedom;
the same manoeuvres are practiced to-day. You must shatter the weapon in
your enemies' hands, which they use against you."--Durand-Maillane, 154.
"The simple execution of constitutional laws," said Bazire, "made for
peaceable times, would be impotent among the conspiracies that surround
you."--Meillan, 108.]

[Footnote 11112: Moniteur, XVIII, 106. (Report of Saint-Just on the
organization of the revolutionary government, October 10th, and the
decree in conformity therewith.) Ibid., 473. (Report of Billaud-Varennes
on a mode of provisional and revolutionary government, Nov. 18th,
and decree in conformity therewith.)--Ib., 479 (session of Nov. 22nd,
1793,.--Speech of Hébrard, spokesman of a deputation from Cantal).
"A central committee of surveillance, a revolutionary army, has been
established in our department. Aristocrats, suspects, the doubtful,
moderates, egoists, all gentlemen without distinguishing those who have
done nothing for the revolution from those who have acted against it,
await in retirement the ulterior measures required by the interests of
the Republic. I have said without distinction of the indifferent from
the suspects; for we hold to these words of Solon's: 'He who is not with
us is against us.'"]

[Footnote 11113: The trousers used in pre-Revolutionary France by the
nobility was called culottes, they terminated just below the knee where
the long cotton or silken stockings would begin. The less affluent used
long trousers and no socks and became known as the Sans-culottes which
became, as mentioned in vol. II. a nickname for the revolutionary
proletariat. (SR.)]

[Footnote 11114: Moniteur, (Speech by Danton, March 26, 1794.) "In
creating revolutionary committees the desire was to establish a species
of dictatorship of citizens the most devoted to liberty over those who
rendered themselves suspects."]

[Footnote 11115: Mallet-Dupan, II., 8. (February, 1794). "At this moment
the entire people is disarmed. Not a gun can be found either in town or
country. If anything attests the super-natural power which the leaders
of the Convention enjoy, it is to see, in one instant, through one act
of the will and nobody offering any resistance, or complaining of it,
the nation from Perpignan to Lille, deprived of every means of defense
against oppression, with a facility still more unprecedented than
that which attended the universal arming of the nation in 1789."--"A
Residence in France," II., 409. "The National Guard as a regular
institution was in great part suppressed after the summer of 1793, those
who composed it being gradually disarmed. Guard-mounting was continued,
but the citizens performing this service were, with very few exceptions,
armed with pikes, and these again were not fully entrusted to them; each
man, on quitting his post, gave up his arms more punctually than if he
had been bound to do so through capitulation with a victorious enemy."]

[Footnote 11116: Moniteur, XVIII., 106. (Report by Saint-Just, Oct.
10th).]

[Footnote 11117: Ibid., 473. (Report of Billaud-Varennes, Nov. 13th).]

[Footnote 11118: Ibid., XVIII., 591. (Speech by Couthon, December 4th).
Ibid., Barère: "Electoral assemblies are monarchical institutions, they
attach to royalism, they must be specially avoided in revolutionary
times."]

[Footnote 11119: Mortimer-Ternaux, VIII., 40. (Decree passed on the
proposition of Danton, session of September 13th). The motive alleged
by Danton is that "members are still found on the committees whose
opinions, at least, approach federalism." Consequently the committees
are purified, and particularly the Committee of General Security. Six
of its members are stricken off (Sept. 14), and the list sent in by the
Committee of Public safety passes without discussion.]

[Footnote 11120: Moniteur, XVIII., 592. (Session of December 4, speech
by Robespierre).]

[Footnote 11121: Miot de Melito, "Mémoires," I., 47.]

[Footnote 11122: Buchez et Roux, XXVIII., 153. Mortimer-Ternaux,
VIII., 443. (Decree of September 28th).--Wallon, "Histoire du Tribunal
Révolutionaire de Paris," IV., 112.]

[Footnote 11123: Buchez et Roux, XXXIV., 300. (Trial of
Fouquier-Tinville and associates). Bill of indictment: "One of these
publicly boasted of always having voted death. Others state that they
were content to see people to give their judgment; physical inspection
alone determined them to vote death. Another said, that when there
was no offense committed it was necessary to imagine one. Another is
a regular sot and has never sat in judgment but in a state of
intoxication. Others came to the bench only to fire their volleys." Etc.
(Supporting evidence.)--"Observe, moreover, that judges and juries are
bound to kill under penalty of death (Ibid.,30)." Fouquier-Tinville
states that on the 22nd of Prairial he took the same step (to resign)
with Chatelet, Brochet and Lerry, when they met Robespierre, returning
to the National Convention arm-in-arm with Barère. Fouquier adds,
that they were treated as aristocrats and anti-revolutionaries, and
threatened with death if they refused to remain on their posts."
Analogous declarations by Pigeot, Ganne, Girard, Dupley, Foucault,
Nollin and Madre. "Sellier adds, that the tribunal having remonstrated
against the law of Prairial 22, he was threatened with arrest by Dumas.
Had we resigned, he says, Dumas would have guillotined us.]

[Footnote 11124: Moniteur, XXIV., 12. (Session of Ventôse 29, year III.,
speech by Baileul). "Terror subdued all minds, suppressed all emotions;
it was the force of the government, while such was this government that
the numerous inhabitants of a vast territory seemed to have lost the
qualities which distinguish man from a domestic animal. They seemed
even to have no life except what the government accorded to them. Human
personality no longer existed; each individual was simply a machine,
going, coming, thinking or not thinking as he was impelled or stimulated
by tyranny."]

[Footnote 11125: Decree of Frimaire 14, year II., Dec. 4, 1793.]

[Footnote 11126: Moniteur, XVII., 473, 474, 478. (Speech by
Billaud-Varennes). "The sword of Damocles must henceforth be brandished
over the entire surface." This expression of Billaud sums up the spirit
of every new institution.]

[Footnote 11127: Moniteur, XVIII., 275. (Session of Oct. 26. 1793,
speech by Barère.) "This is the most revolutionary step you can take."
(Applause.)]

[Footnote 11128: Ibid., 520. (Report of Barère and decree in
conformity). "The representatives sent on mission are required to
conform strictly to the acts of the Committee of Public Safety. Generals
and other agents of the executive power will, under no pretext, obey
any special order, that they may refuse to carry out the said
acts."--Moniteur, XVIII., 291. (Report by Barère, Oct. 29, 1793.) At
this date one hundred and forty representatives are on mission.]

[Footnote 11129: Archives Nationales, AF. II., 22. (Papers of the
'Committee of Public Safety. Note on the results of the revolutionary
government without either date or signature.) "The law of Frimaire 14
created two centers of influence from which action spread, in the sense
of the Committee, and which affected the authorities. These two pivots
of revolutionary rule outside the Committee were the representatives of
the people on missions and the national agents controlling the district
committees. The word revolutionary government alone exercised an
incalculable magical influence."--Mallet-Dupan, "Mémoires," II., p. 2,
and following pages.]





BOOK SECOND. THE JACOBIN PROGRAM.




CHAPTER I. THE JACOBIN PARTY




I. The Doctrine.

     Program of the Jacobin party.--Abstract principle and
     spontaneous development of the theory.

Nothing is more dangerous than a general idea in narrow and empty minds:
as they are empty, it finds no knowledge there to interfere with it; as
they are narrow it is not long before it occupies the place entirely.
Henceforth they no longer belong to themselves but are mastered by it;
it works in them and through them, the man, in the true sense of the
word, being possessed. Something which is not himself, a monstrous
parasite, a foreign and disproportionate conception, lives within
him, developing and giving birth to the evil purposes with which it is
pregnant. He did not foresee that he would have them; he did not know
what his dogma contained, what venomous and murderous consequences were
to issue from it. They issue from it fatally, each in its turn, and
under the pressure of circumstances, at first anarchical consequences
and now despotic consequences. Having obtained power, the Jacobin brings
his fixed idea along with him; whether at the head of the government or
in opposition to it, this idea is fruitful, and the all-powerful dogma
projects over a new domain the innumerable links of its endless chain.




II. A Communist State.

     The Jacobin concept of Society.--The Contrat-Social.--Total
     surrender of the Individual to the Community.--Everything
     belongs to the State.--Confiscations and Sequestrations.
     --Pre-emption and requisition and requisition of produce and
     merchandise.--Individuals belong to the State.--Drafts of
     persons for Military service.--Drafts of persons for the
     Civil service.--The State philanthropist, educator,
     theologian, moralist, censor and director of ideas and
     intimate feelings.

Let us trace this inward development and go back, along with the
Jacobin, to first principles, to the original pact, to the first
organization of society. There is but one just and sound society, the
one founded on the "contrat-social," and

"the clauses of this contract, fully understood, reduce themselves to
one, the total transfer of each individual, with all his rights, to
the community,.... each surrendering himself up absolutely, just as
he actually stands, he and all his forces, of which the property he
possesses forms a part."[2101]

There must be no exception or reservation. Nothing of what he previously
was, or had, now belongs to him in his own right; henceforth, what he
is, or has, devolves upon him only through delegation. His property
and his person now form a portion of the commonwealth. If he is in
possession of these, his ownership is at second hand; if he derives
any benefit there from, it is as a concession. He is their depository,
trustee and administrator, and nothing more.[2102] In other words, with
respect to these he is simply a managing director, that is to say
a functionary like others, with a precarious appointment and always
revocable by the State which has appointed him.

"As nature gives to every man absolute power over the members of his
body the social pact gives the social body absolute power over all its
members."

The State, as omnipotent sovereign and universal proprietor,
exercises at discretion, its boundless rights over persons and things;
consequently we, its representatives, take all things and persons into
our hands; as they belong to it, so do they belong to us.

We have confiscated the possessions of the clergy, amounting to
about four billion livres; we confiscate the property of the emigrés,
amounting to three billion livres;[2103] we confiscate the property
of the guillotined and deported: all this amounts to some hundreds of
millions; later on, the count will be made, because the list remains
open and is being daily added to. We will sequestrate the property of
"suspects," which gives us the right to use it: here are many hundred
millions more; after the war and the banishment of "suspects," we shall
seize the property along with its income: here, again, are billions of
capital.[2104] Meanwhile we take the property of hospitals and of other
benevolent institutions, about eight hundred million livres; we take the
property of factories, of endowments, of educational institutions, and
of literary and scientific associations: another lot of millions.[2105]
We take back the domains rented or surrendered by the State for the
past three centuries and more, which gives again about a couple of
billions.[2106] We take the possessions of the communes up to the amount
of their indebtedness. We have already received as inheritance the
ancient domains of the crown, also the later domain of the civil list.
More than three-fifths[2107] of the soil thus falls into our hands,
which three-fifths are much the best stocked; they comprise almost
all the large and fine edifices, châteaux, abbeys, mansions, houses of
superintendents and nearly all the royal, episcopal, seigniorial and
bourgeois stock of rich and elegant furniture; all plate, libraries,
pictures and artistic objects accumulated for centuries.--Remark, again,
the seizure of specie and all other articles of gold and silver; in the
months alone of November and December, 1793, this swoop puts into our
coffers three or four hundred millions,[2108] not assignats, but ringing
coin. In short, whatever the form of established capital may be we take
all we can get hold of, probably more than three-fourths of it.--There
remains the portion which is not fixed capital, that which disappears
in use, namely, all that is consumed, all the fruits of the soil, every
description of provision, all the products of human art and labor
which contribute the maintenance of existence. Through "the right of
pre-emption" and through the right of "requisition," "the Republic
becomes temporary proprietor of whatever commerce, manufacture and
agriculture have produced and added to the soil of France: "all food and
merchandise is ours before being owned by their holder. We carry out of
his house whatever suits us; we pay him for this with worthless paper;
we frequently do not pay him at all. For greater convenience, we seize
objects directly and wherever we find them, grain in the farmer's barn,
hay in the reaper's shed, cattle in the fold, wine in the vats, hides
at the butcher's, leather in the tanneries, soap, tallow, sugar, brandy,
cloths, linens and the rest, in stores, depots and ware-houses. We stop
vehicles and the horses in the street. We enter the premises of mail
or coach contractors and empty their stables. We carry away kitchen
utensils to obtain the copper; we turn people out of their rooms to get
their beds; we strip them of their coats and shirts; in one day, we make
ten thousand individuals in one town go barefoot.[2109]

"When public needs require it," says representative Isoré, "all belongs
to the people and nothing to individuals."

By virtue of the same right we dispose of persons as we do of things. We
decree the levy en masse and, stranger still, we carry it out, at least
in many parts of the country, and we keep it up for months: in Vendée,
and in the northern and eastern departments, it is the entire male,
able-bodied population, up to fifty years of age, which we drive in
herds against the enemy.[2110] We afterwards sign an entire generation
on, all young men between eighteen and twenty-five, almost a million of
men:[2111] whoever fails to appear is put in irons for ten years; he is
regarded as a deserter; his property is confiscated, and his family is
punished as well; later he is classed with the emigrants, condemned to
death, and his father, mother and progenitors, treated as "suspects,"
imprisoned and their possessions taken.--To clothe, shoe and equip
our recruits, we must have workmen; we summon to head-quarters all
gunsmiths, blacksmiths and locksmiths, all the tailors and shoemakers of
the district, "foremen, apprentices and boys;"[2112] we imprison those
who do not come; we install the rest in squads in public buildings
and assign them their tasks; they are forbidden to furnish anything to
private individuals. Henceforth, French shoemakers must work only for
us, and each must deliver to us, under penalty, so many pairs of shoes
per decade.[2113]--But, the civil service is no less important than the
military service, and to feed the people is as urgent as it is to defend
them. Hence we put "in requisition all who have anything to do with
handling, transporting or selling provisions and articles of prime
necessity,"[2114] especially combustibles and food--wood-choppers,
carters, raftsmen, millers, reapers, threshers, wine-growers, movers,
field-hands, "country people" of every kind and degree. Their hands
belong to us: we make them bestir themselves and work under the penalty
of fine and imprisonment. There shall be no idlers, especially in crop
time: we take the entire population of a commune or canton into the
fields, comprising "the lazy of both sexes;"[2115] willingly or not,
they shall do the harvesting under our eyes, banded together in fields
belonging to others as well as in their own, and they shall put the
sheaves indiscriminately into the public granary.

But in labor all hangs together, from the initial undertaking to the
final result, from the raw material to the most finished production,
from the great manufacturer down to the pettiest jobber; grasping the
first link of the chain involves grasping the last one. The requisition
here again answers the purpose: we apply it to all pursuits; each is
bound to continue his own; the manufacturer to manufacture, the trader
to trade, even to his own detriment, because, if he works at a loss, the
public profits, and every good citizen ought to prefer public profit to
his own profit.[2116] In effect, let his office be what it will, he
is an employee of the community; therefore, the community may not only
prescribe task-work to him, but select his task; it need not consult
him in the matter, for he has no right to refuse. Hence it is that we
appoint or maintain people in spite of themselves, in the magistracy,
in the army and in every other species of employment. In vain may they
excuse themselves or try get out of the way; they must remain or
become generals, judges, mayors, national agents, town councilors,
commissioners of public welfare or administration,[2117] even against
their will. Too bad for them if the responsibility is expensive or
dangerous, if they have no time for leisure, if they do not feel
themselves qualified for it, if the rank or services seems to them to
lead to a prison or the guillotine; when they declare that the work is
forced labor we reply that they liable to work for the State.--Such is,
henceforth, the condition of all Frenchmen, and likewise of all French
women. We force mothers to take their daughters to the meetings of
popular clubs. We oblige women to parade in companies, and march in
procession at republican festivals; we invade the family and select
the most beautiful to be draped as antique goddesses, and publicly
promenaded on a chariot; we sometimes even designate those among the
rich who must wed patriots[2118]: there is no reason why marriage, which
is the most important of all services, should not be put in requisition
like the others.--Accordingly, we enter families, we carry of the
child, we subject him to a civic education. We are schoolmasters,
philanthropists, theologians, and moralists. We impose by force our
religion and our ritual, our morality and our social customs. We lord it
over private lives and consciences; we dictate ideas, we scrutinize and
punish secret inclinations, we tax, imprison and guillotine not only
the evil-disposed, but again "the indifferent, the moderate and the
egoists."[2119] Over and above his visible acts we dictate to the
individual his ideas and his deepest feelings; we prescribe to him his
affections as well as his beliefs, and, according to a preconceived
type, we refashion his intellect, his conscience and his sensibilities.




III. The object of the State is the regeneration of man.

     The object of the State is the regeneration of man.--Two
     sides to this undertaking.--Restoration of the Natural man.
     --Formation of the Social man.--Grandeur of the undertaking.
     --To carry it out, the use of force is a right and a duty.

There is nothing arbitrary in this operation; for the ideal model is
traced beforehand. If the State is omnipotent, it is for the purpose of
"regenerating Mankind," and the theory which confers its rights, at the
same time assigns to it its object. In what does this regeneration
of Man consist?--Consider a domestic animal such as a dog or a horse.
Scrawny, battered, tied up or chained, a thousand are strained and
overworked compared to the few basking in idleness, dying from rich
living; and with all of them, whether fat or lean, the soul is more
spoiled than the body. A superstitious respect keeps them cowed under
their burden, or makes them cringe before their master. Servile,
slothful, gluttonous, feeble, incapable of resisting adversity, if they
have acquired the miserable skills of slavery, they have also contracted
its needs, weaknesses and vices. A crust of absurd habits and perverse
inclinations, a sort of artificial and supplementary being, has covered
over their original nature.--And, on the other hand, the better side of
their original nature has had no chance to develop itself, for lack of
use. Separated from the other, these two parts of its nature have
not acquired the sentiment of community; they do not know, like their
brethren of the prairies, how to help each other and subordinate private
interests to the interests of the flock. Each pulls his own way,
nobody cares for others, all are egoists; social interests have
miscarried.--Such is Man nowadays, a disfigured slave that has to be
restored. Our task, accordingly is two-fold: we have to demolish and we
have to construct; we must first set free the natural Man that we may
afterwards build up the social Man.

It is a vast enterprise and we are conscious of its vastness.

"It is necessary," says Billaud-Varennes,[2120] "that the people to
which one desires to restore their freedom should in some way be created
anew, since old prejudices must be destroyed, old habits changed,
depraved affections improved, superfluous wants restricted, and
inveterate vices extirpated."

But the task is sublime, as the aim is "to fulfill the desires of
nature,[2121] accomplish the destinies of humanity, and fulfill the
promises of philosophy".--"Our purpose," says Robespierre,[2122] "is
to substitute morality for egoism, honesty for honor, principles for
custom, duties for etiquette, the empire of reason for the tyranny of
fashion, contempt of vice for indifference to misfortune, pride for
arrogance, a noble mind for vanity, love of glory for the love of
profit, good people for high society, merit for intrigue, genius for
intellectual brilliancy, the charm of contentment for the boredom of
voluptuous pleasure, the majesty of Man for the high-breeding of
the great, a magnanimous, powerful and happy people for an amiable,
frivolous and wretched people, that is to say, every virtue and miracle
of the Republic in the place of the vices and absurdities of the
monarchy."

We will do this, the whole of it, whatever the cost. Little do we care
for the present generation: we are working for generations to come.

"Man, forced to isolate himself from society, anchors himself in
the future and presses to his heart a posterity innocent of existing
evils."[2123]

He sacrifices to this work his own and the lives of others.

"On the day that I am persuaded," writes Saint-Just, "that it is
impossible to render the French people kind, energetic, tender and
relentless against tyranny and injustice, I will stab myself."

--"What I have done in the South I will do in the North," says Baudot;
"I will convert them into patriots; either they or I must die."--

"We will make France a cemetery," says Carrier, "rather than not
regenerate it our own way."

In vain may the ignorant or the vicious protest; they protest because
they are ignorant or vicious. In vain may the individual plead his
personal rights; he has none: through the social contract, which is
obligatory and solely valid, he has surrendered his entire being; having
made no reservation, "he has nothing to claim." Undoubtedly, some will
grumble, because, with them, the old wrinkle remains and artificial
habits still cover over the original instinct. Untie the mill-horse, and
he will still go round in the same track; let the mountebank's dog be
turned loose, and he will still raise himself on his hind-legs; if we
would bring them back to their natural gait we must handle them roughly.
In like manner, to restore Man to his normal attitude, you must handle
him roughly. But, in this respect, have no scruples,[2124] for we do not
bow him down, we raise him up; as Rousseau says, "we compel him to be
free;" we confer on him the greatest boon a human being can receive; we
bring him back to nature and to justice. For this reason, now that he
is warned, if he persists in his resistance, he is a criminal and merits
every kind of chastisements[2125], for, he declares himself a rebel and
a perjurer, inimical to humanity, and a traitor to the social compact.




IV. Two distortions of the natural man.

     Two distortions of the natural man.--Positive religion.
     --Proscription of the orthodox cult.--Measures against unsworn
     priests.--Measures against the loyal orthodox.--Destruction
     of the constitutional cult.--Pressure on the sworn priests.
     --Churches closed and ceremonies suppressed.--Continuation of
     these persecutions until the Consulate.

Let us (Taine lets the Jacobin say) begin by figuring to ourselves the
natural man; certainly we of to-day have some difficulty in recognizing
him; he bears but little resemblance to the artificial being who (in
1789) stands in his shoes, the creature which an antiquated system of
constraint and fraud has deformed, held fast in his hereditary harness
of thralldom and superstition, blinded by his religion and held in check
by prestige, exploited by his government and tamed by dint of blows,
always with a halter on, always put to work in the wrong way and against
nature, whatever stall he may occupy, high or low, however full or
empty his crib may be, now in menial service like the blinded hack-horse
turning the mill-wheel, and now on parade like a trained dog which,
decked with flags, shows off its antics before the public.[2126] But
imagine all these out of the way, the flags and the bands, the fetters
and compartments in the social stable, and you will see a new man
appearing, the original man, intact and healthy in mind, soul and
body.--In this condition, he is free of prejudice, he is not ensnared in
a net of lies, he is neither Jew, Protestant nor Catholic; if he tries
to imagine the universe as a whole and the principle of events, he will
not let himself be duped by a pretended revelation; he will listen only
to his own reason; he may chance, now and then, to become an atheist,
but, generally, he will settle down into a deist.--In this condition
of things he is not fettered by a hierarchy; he is neither noble nor
commoner, land-owner nor tenant, inferior nor superior. Independent
of the others, all are equal, and, if all agree in the forming of an
association, their common-sense will stipulate that its first article
shall secure the maintenance of this primordial equality.--Such is man,
as nature made him, as history has unmade him, and as the Revolution is
to re-make him.[2127] One cannot batter away too vigorously against the
two casings that hold him tight, one the positive religion which narrows
and perverts his intellect, and the other the social inequality which
perverts and weakens his will;[2128] for, at every effort, some band is
loosened, and, as each band gives way, the paralyzed limbs recover their
action.

Let us trace, (say the Jacobins), the progress of this liberating
operation.--Always timid and at loggerheads with the ecclesiastical
organization, the Constituent Assembly could take only half-measures; it
cut into the bark without daring to drive the ax into the solid trunk.
Its work reduced itself down to the confiscation of clerical property,
to a dissolution of the religious orders, and to a check upon the
authority of the pope; its object was to establish a new church and
transform priests into sworn functionaries of the State, and this
was all. As if Catholicism, even administrative, would cease to be
Catholicism! As if the noxious tree, once stamped with the public seal,
would cease to be noxious! Instead of the old laboratory of falsehoods
being destroyed another one is officially established alongside of it,
so that there are now two instead of one. With or without the official
label it operates in every commune in France and, as in the past, it
distributes with impunity its drug to the public. This is precisely
what we, (the Jacobins) cannot tolerate.--We must, indeed, keep up
appearances, and, as far as words go, we will decree anew freedom
of worship.[2129] But, in fact and in practice, we will demolish the
laboratory and prevent the drug from being sold; there shall no longer
be any Catholic worship in France, no baptism, no confession, no
marriage, no extreme unction, no mass; nobody shall preach or listen
to a sermon; nobody shall administer or receive a sacrament, save
in secret, and with the prospect before him of imprisonment or the
scaffold.--With this object in mind, we do one thing at a time. There
is no problem with the Church claiming to be be orthodox: its members
having refused to take the oath are outlaws; one excludes oneself
from an association when one repudiates the pact; they have lost their
qualifications as citizens and have become ordinary foreigners under
the surveillance of the police; and, as they propagate around them
discontent and disobedience, they are not only foreigners but seditious
persons, enemies in disguise, the authors of a secret and widespread
Vendée; it is not necessary for us to prosecute them as charlatans, it
is sufficient to strike them down as rebels. As such, we have already
banished from France all unsworn ecclesiastics, about forty thousand
priests, and we are deporting those who did not cross the frontier
within the allotted time: we allow only sexagenarians and the infirm to
remain on French soil, and, again, as prisoners and in seclusion; they
incur the penalty of death if they do not of their own accord report to
the prisons of their country town; the banished who return home incur
the penalty of death, and there is penalty of death against those who
shelter priests.[2130] Consequently, in default of an orthodox clergy,
there must no longer be an orthodox worship; the most dangerous of the
two manufactories of superstition is shut down. That the sale of this
poisonous food may be more surely stopped we punish those who ask for it
the same as those who provide it, and we prosecute not only the pastors,
but, again, the fanatics of the flock; if these are not the authors of
the ecclesiastical rebellion they are its promoters and accomplices.
Now, thanks to the schism among them, we already know who they are,
and, in each commune, the list is made out. We style as fanatics all who
reject the ministry of the sworn priests, the bourgeois who calls him an
interloper, all the nuns who do not confess to him, all the peasants who
stay away from his mass, all the old women who do not kiss his paten,
and all the relations of an infant who do not wish him to baptize it.
All these people and those who associate with them, whether allied,
close relatives, friends, guests or visitors, of whatever class, either
men or women, are seditious at heart, and, therefore, "suspects." We
deprive them of their electoral rights, we withdraw their pensions, we
impose on them special taxation, we confine them to their dwellings, we
imprison them by thousands, and guillotine them by hundreds; the
rest will gradually become discouraged and abandon an impracticable
cult.[2131]--The lukewarm remain, the sheep-like crowd which holds on
to its rites: the Constituent Assembly will seize them wherever it finds
them, and, as they are the same in the authorized as in the refractory
church, instead of seeking them with the priest who does not submit, it
will seek them with the one who does. But it will proceed without zeal,
without confidence, often even with distrust, questioning itself whether
these rites, being administered by one who is excommunicated, are not of
doubtful quality. Such a church is not sound, and we have only to
give it a push to knock it down. We will do all we can to discredit
constitutional priests: we will prohibit them from wearing the
ecclesiastical costume, and force them by law to bestow the nuptial
benediction on their apostate brethren; we will employ terror and
imprisonment to constrain them to marry; we will given them no respite
until they return to civil life, some admitting themselves to be
impostors, many by surrendering their priestly credentials, and most
of them by resigning their places.[2132] Deprived of leaders by these
voluntary or forced desertions, the Catholic flock will allow itself
to be easily led out of the fold, while, to remove all temptation to go
back, we will tear the enclosure down. In the communes in which we are
masters we will make the Jacobins of the place demand the abolition
of worship, while, in other communes, we will get rid of this
authoritatively through our missionary representatives. We will close
the churches, demolish the steeples, melt down the bells, send all
sacred vessels to the Mint, smash the images of the saints, desecrate
relics, prohibit religious burials, impose the civil burial, prescribe
rest during the décadi[2133] and labor on Sundays. No exception
whatever. Since all positive religions deal in error, we will outlaw
them all: we will exact from Protestant clergymen a public abjuration;
we will not let the Jews practice their ceremonies; we will have "an
'auto-da-fé,' of all the books and symbols of the faith of Moses."[2134]
But, of all these various juggling machines, the worst is the Catholic,
the most hostile to nature due to the celibacy of its priesthood, the
most opposed to reason in the absurdity of its dogmas, the most opposed
to democracy, since its powers are delegated from above downwards,
the best protected from civil authority because its head is outside
of France.[2135] Accordingly, we must be most furious against it; even
after Thermidor,[2136] we will keep up constant persecution, great and
small; up to the Consulate, we will deport and shoot the priests, we
will revive against fanatics the laws of the Reign of Terror, we will
hamper their movements, we will exhaust their patience; we will keep
them anxious during the day and restless at night; we will not give them
a moment's repose.[2137] We will restrict the population to the decadal
cult only; we will change the market-days, so that no believer shall
be able to buy fish on a fast-day.[2138]--We have nothing more at heart
than this war against Catholicism; no article on our program will be
carried out with more determination and perseverance. The question
involved is truth. We are its guardians, its champions, its ministers,
and never did the servants of truth apply force with such minute detail
and such effect to the extirpation of error.




V. Equality and Inequality.

     Social inequality.--Malice of the aristocratic race.
     --Measures against the King and Nobles.--Malice of the
     aristocracy of wealth.--Measures against landowners,
     capitalists and people with incomes.--Destruction of large
     fortunes.--Measures taken to prevent the large fortunes in
     reconstituting themselves.

Next to superstition there is another monster to be destroyed, and, also
here it was the Constituent Assembly that had begun the assault. But it
had also, through lack of courage or of logic, it stopped, after two or
three feeble blows:

* Banning of heraldic insignia, titles of nobility and territorial
names;

* abolition, without indemnity, of all the dues belonging to the
seigneur by right of his former proprietorship over persons;

* abolition of the permission to purchase other feudal rights at a price
agreed upon,

* limitation of royal power. This was little enough. When it concerns
usurpers and tyrants they must be treated in another fashion; for their
privilege is, of itself, an outrage on the rights of man. Consequently,

* we (the Jacobins) have dethroned the King and cut off his head;[2139]

* we have suppressed, without indemnity, the entire feudal debt,
comprising the rights vested in the seigneurs by virtue of their being
owners of real-estate, and merely lessors;

* we have abandoned their persons and possessions to the claims and
rancor of local jacqueries;

* we have reduced them to emigration;

* we imprison them if they stay at home;

* we guillotine them if they return.

(As the aristocrats are)Reared in habits of supremacy, and convinced
that they are of a different species from other men, the prejudices of
their race are incorrigible; they are incapable of companionship with
their social equals; we cannot too carefully crush them out, or, at the
very least, hold them firmly down.[2140] Besides, they are guilty from
the fact of having existed; for, they have taken both the lead and the
command without any right to do so, and, in violation of all right, they
have misused mankind; having enjoyed their rank, it is but just that
they should pay for it. Privileged in reverse, they must be treated the
same as vagabonds were treated under their reign,

* stopped by the police and sent off with their families into the
interior,

* crowded into prisons,

* executed in a mass, or, at least,

* expelled from Paris, the seaports and fortified towns, put on the
limits,

* compelled to present themselves daily at the municipality,

* deprived of their political rights,

* excluded from public offices, "popular clubs, committees of
supervision and from communal and section assemblages."[2141]

Even this is indulgence; branded with infamy, we ought to class them
with galley-slaves, and set them to work on the public highways.[2142]

"Justice condemns the people's enemies and the partisans of tyranny to
eternal slavery."[2143]

But that is not enough, because, apart from the aristocracy of rank,
there are other aristocracies which the Constituent Assembly has left
untouched,[2144] especially the aristocracy of wealth. Of all the
sovereignties, that of the rich man over the poor one is the most
burdensome. In effect, not only, in contempt of equality, does he
consume more than his share of the common products of labor, and without
producing anything himself, but again, in contempt of liberty, he may
fix wages as he pleases, and, in contempt of humanity, he always fixes
them at the lowest point. Between himself and the needy he never makes
other than the most unjust contracts. Sole possessor of land, capital
and the necessities of life, he imposes conditions which others,
deprived of means, are forced to accept at the risk of starvation; he
speculates at his discretion on wants which cannot be put off, and makes
the most of his monopoly by maintaining the poor in their destitute
situations. That is why, writes Saint Just:[2145]

"Opulence is a disgrace; for every thousand livres expenditure of this
kind a smaller number of natural or adopted children can be looked
after."--

"The richest Frenchman," says Robespierre, "ought not to have now more
three thousand livres rental."--

Beyond what is strictly necessary, no property is legitimate; we have
the right to take the superfluous wherever we find it. Not only to-day,
because we now require it for the State and for the poor, but at all
times, because the superfluous, in all times, confers on its owner an
advantage in contracts, a control of wages, an arbitrary power over
the means of living, in short, a supremacy of condition worse than
preeminence in rank. Consequently, our hand is not only against the
nobles, but also against the rich and well-to-do bourgeois[2146] the
large land-owners and capitalists; we are going to demolish their crafty
feudalism from top to bottom.[2147]--In the first place, and merely
through the effect of the new institutions, we prevent any capitalist
from deducting, as he is used to do, the best portion of the fruits of
another's labor; the hornets shall no longer, year after year, consume
the honey of the bees. To bring this about, we have only to let the
assignats (paper money) and their forced rate (of exchange) work things
out. Through the depreciation of paper-money, the indolent land-owner
or capitalist sees his income melting away in his hands; his receipts
consist only of nominal values. On the 1st of January, his tenant pays
him really for a half term instead of a full term; on the 1st of March,
his farmer settles his account with a bag of grain.[2148] The effect
is just the same as if we had made fresh contracts, and reduced by
one-half, three-quarters, or, even more, the rate of interest on loans,
the rent of houses and the leases of farm lands.--Whilst the revenue of
the landlord evaporates, his capital melts away, and we do the best
we can to help this along. If he has claims on ancient corporations
or civil and religious establishments of any description, whether
provincial governments, congregations, associations, endowments or
hospitals, we withdraw his special guarantee; we convert his title-deeds
into a state annuity, we combine his private fortune with the public
fortune whether he will or not, we drag him into the universal
bankruptcy, toward which we are conducting all the creditors of the
Republic.[2149]--Besides, to ruin him, we have more direct and prompt
means. If an émigré, and there are hundreds of thousands of émigrés, we
confiscate his possessions. If he has been guillotined or deported, and
there are tens of thousands of these, we confiscate his possessions.
If he is "recognized as an enemy of the Revolution,"[2150] and "all
the rich pray for the counter-revolution,"[2151] we sequestrate his
property, enjoying the usufruct of it until peace is declared, and we
shall have the property after the war is over. Usufruct or property, the
State, in either case, inherits; at the most we might grant temporary
aid to the family, which is not even entitled to maintenance.

It is impossible to uproot fortunes more thoroughly. As to those which
are not at once eradicated we get rid of them piecemeal, and against
these we employ two axes:

On the one hand, we decree the principle of progressive taxation, and
on this basis we establish the forced loan:[2152] in incomes, we
distinguish between the essential and the surplus; we fix according as
the excess is greater or less we take a quarter, a third or the half of
it, and, when above nine thousand francs, the whole; beyond its small
alimentary reserve, the most opulent family will keep only four thousand
five hundred francs income.

On the other hand, we cut deep into capital through revolutionary taxes;
our committees and provincial proconsuls levy arbitrarily what suits
them, three hundred, five hundred, up to one million two hundred
thousand francs,[2153] on this or that banker, trader, bourgeois or
widow, payable within a week; all the worse for the person taxed if he
or she has no money on hand and is unable to borrow it; we declare them
"suspects," we imprison them, we sequestrate their property and the
State enjoys it in their place.

In any event, even when the amount is paid, we force him or her
to deposit their silver and gold coin in our hands, sometimes with
assignats as security, and often nothing; henceforth, money must
circulate and the precious metals are in requisition;[2154] everybody
will deliver up what plate he possesses. And let nobody presume to
conceal his hoard; all treasure, whether silver-plate, diamonds,
ingots, gold or silver, coined or un-coined, "discovered, or that may
be discovered, buried in the ground or concealed in cellars, inside of
walls or in garrets, under floors, pavements, or hearthstones, or in
chimneys and other hiding places,"[2155] becomes the property of
the Republic, with a premium of twenty per cent. in assignats to the
informer.--As, furthermore, we make requisitions for bed-linen, beds,
clothes, provisions, wines and the rests, along with specie and precious
metals, the condition of the mansion may be imagined, especially after
we have lodged in it; it is the same as if the house had been on fire;
all movable property and all real estate have perished.--Now that both
are destroyed they must not be allowed to accumulate again. To ensure
this,

1. we abolish, according to rule, the freedom of bequest,[2156]

2. we prescribe equal and obligatory divisions of all
inheritances;[2157]

3. we include bastards in this under the same title as legitimate
children;

4. we admit representation à l'infini,[2158] "in order to multiply heirs
and parcel out inheritances;"[2159]

5. we reduce the disposable portion to one-tenth, in the direct line,
and one-sixth in a collateral line;

6. we forbid any gift to persons whose income exceeds one thousand
quintals of grain;

7. we inaugurate adoption, "an admirable institution," and essentially
republican, "since it brings about a division of large properties
without a crisis."

Already, in the Legislative Assembly a deputy had stated that "equal
rights could be maintained only by a persistent tendency to uniformity
of fortunes."[2160]

We have provided for this for the present day and we likewise provide
for it in the future.--None of the vast tumors which have sucked the
sap of the human plant are to remain; we have cut them away with a few
telling blows, while the steady-moving machine, permanently erected
by us, will shear off their last tendrils should they change to sprout
again.




VI. Conditions requisite for making a citizen.

     Conditions requisite for making a citizen.--Plans for
     suppressing poverty.--Measures in favor of the poor.

In returning Man to his natural condition we have prepared for the
advent of the Social Man. The object now is to form the citizen, and
this is possible only through a leveling of conditions. In a well made
society there shall be "neither rich nor poor"[2161]: we have already
destroyed the opulence which corrupts; it now remains for us to suppress
the poverty which degrades. Under the tyranny of material things, which
is as oppressive as the tyranny of men, Man falls below himself. Never
will a citizen be made out of a poor fellow condemned to remain valet,
hireling or beggar, reduced to thinking only of himself and his daily
bread, asking in vain for work, or, plodding when he gets it, twelve
hours a day at a monotonous pursuit, living like a beast of burden and
dying in a alms-house.[2162] He should have his own bread, his own roof,
and all that is indispensable for life; he must not be overworked, nor
suffer anxiety or constraint;

"he must live independently, respect himself, have a tidy wife and
healthy and robust children."[2163]

The community should guarantee him comfort, security, the certainty of
not going hungry if he becomes infirm, and, if he dies, of not leaving
his family in want.

"It is not enough," says Barère,[2164] "to bleed the rich, to pull down
colossal fortunes; the slavery of poverty must be banished from the soil
of the Republic. No more beggars, no more almsgiving, no poor-houses".

"The poor and unfortunates," says Saint Just, "are the powerful of the
earth; they have a right to speak as masters to the governments which
neglect them;[2165] they have a right to national charity.... In a
democracy under construction, every effort should be made to free people
from having to battle for the bare minimum needed for survival; by labor
if he is fit for work, by education if he is a child, or with public
assistance if he is an invalid or in old age."[2166]

And never had the moment been so favorable. "Rich in property, the
Republic now expects to use the many millions the rich would have spent
on a counter revolution for the improvement of the conditions of its
less fortunate citizens... Those who would assassinate liberty have made
it the richer. The possessions of conspirators exist for the benefit of
the unfortunate."[2167]--Let the poor take with a clear conscience: it
is not a charity but "an indemnity" which we provide for them; we save
their pride by providing for their comfort, and we relieve them without
humiliating them.

"We leave charity and benevolent works to the monarchies; this insolent
and shabby way of furnishing assistance is fit only for slaves and
masters; we substitute for it a system of national works, on a grand
scale, over the whole territory of the Republic."[2168]

On the other hand, we cause a statement to be drawn up in each commune,
of "the condition of citizens without property," and "of national
possessions not disposed of;" we divide these possession in small lots;
we distribute them "in the shape of national sales" to poor folks able
to work. We give, "through the form of rental, "an acre to each head
of a family who has less than an acre of his own. "We thus bind all
citizens to the country as well as to property. We restore idle and
robust arms to the soil, and lost or weakened families to the workshops
in the towns."--As to old and infirm farmers or craftsmen, also poor
mothers, wives and widows of artisans and farmers, we keep in each
department a "big ledger of national welfare;" we inscribe thereon for
every thousand inhabitants, four farmers, two mechanics, five women,
either mothers or widows; each registered person shall be pensioned
by the State, the same as a maimed soldier; labor-invalids are as
respectable as war-invalids.--Over and above those who are thus aided
on account of poverty, we relieve and elevate the entire poor class, not
alone the thirteen hundred thousand destitutes counted in France,[2169]
but, again, all who, having little or no means on hand, live from day
to day on what they can earn. We have passed a law[2170] by which the
public treasury shall, through a tax on large fortunes, "furnish to each
commune or district the necessary funds for adapting the price of bread
to the rate of wages." Our representatives in the provinces impose
on the wealthy the obligation of "lodging, feeding, and clothing all
infirm, aged, and indigent citizens and orphans of their respective
cantons."[2171] Through the decree on monopolization and the
establishment of the "maximum" we bring within reach of the poor all
objects of prime necessity. We pay them forty sous a day for attending
district meetings; and three francs a day for serving on committees of
surveillance. We recruit from amongst them our revolutionary army;[2172]
we select amongst them the innumerable custodians of sequesters: in
this way, hundreds of thousands of sans-culottes enter into the various
public services.--At last, the poor are taken out of a state of poverty:
each will now have his plot of ground, his salary or pension;

"in a well-ordered republic nobody is without some property."[2173]

Henceforth, among individuals, the difference in welfare will be small;
from the maximum to the minimum, there will be only a degree, while
there will be found in every dwelling about the same sort of household,
a plain, simple household, that of the small rural proprietor, well-off
farmer or factory foreman; that of Rousseau at Montmorency, or that
of the Savoyard Vicar, or that of Duplay, the carpenter, with whom
Robespierre lodges.[2174] There will be no more domestic servitude:
"only the bond of help and gratitude will exists between employer and
employee."[2175]--He who works for another citizen belongs to his family
and sits at his table."[2176]--Through the transformation of lower
social classes into middle class conditions we restore human dignity,
and out of the proletarian, the valet and the workman, we begin to
liberate the citizen.




VII. Socialist projects.

     Repression of Egoism.--Measures against farmers,
     manufacturers and merchants.--Socialist projects.
     --Repression of Federalism.--Measures against the local,
     professional and family spirit.

Two leading obstacles hinder the development of civism, and the first is
egoism. Whilst the citizen prefers the community to himself, the egoist
prefers himself to the community. He cares only for his own interest, he
gives no heed to public necessities; he sees none of the superior
rights which take precedence of his derived right; he supposes that his
property is his own without restriction or condition; he forgets
that, if he is allowed to use it, he must not use it to another's
detriment.[2177] This even the middle or low class, who possess goods
essential for survival, will do. The greater the demand for these
goods the higher they raise their prices; soon, they sell only at an
exorbitant rate, and worse still, stop selling and store their goods or
products, in the expectation of selling them dearer. In this way, they
speculate on another's wants; they augment the general distress and
become public enemies. Nearly all the agriculturists, manufacturers
and tradesmen of the day, little and big, are public enemies--farmers,
tenant farmers, market-gardeners, cultivators of every degree, as well
as foremen, shopkeepers, especially wine-dealers, bakers and butchers.

"All merchants are essentially anti-revolutionaries, and would sell
their country to gain a few pennies."[2178]

We will not tolerate this legal brigandage. Since "agriculture has done
nothing for liberty and has sought only its own gain,"[2179] we will put
it under surveillance, and, if necessary, under control. Since
"commerce has become a species of miserly tyrant," since "it has become
self-paralyzed," and, "through a sort of anti-revolutionary contempt,
neglected the manufacture, handling and expedition of diverse
materials," we will thwart "the calculations of its barbarous
arithmetic, and purge it of the aristocratic and corrupting fermentation
which oppresses it." We make monopoly "a capital crime;"[2180] we call
him a monopolist who "takes food and wares of prime necessity out of
circulation," and "keeps them stored without daily and publicly offering
them for sale." Penalty of death against whoever, within eight days,
does not make a declaration, or if he makes a false one. Penalty of
death against the dealer who does not post up the contents of his
warehouse, or who does not keep open shop. Penalty of death against
any person who keeps more bread on hand than he needs for his
subsistence.[2181] Penalty of death against the cultivator who does not
bring his grain weekly to market. Penalty of death against the dealer
who does not post up the contents of his warehouse, or who does not keep
open shop. Penalty of death against the manufacturer who does not verify
the daily use of his workable material.--As to prices, we intervene
authoritatively between buyer and seller; we fix the maximum price for
all objects which, near or remotely, serve to feed, warm and clothe man;
we will imprison whoever offers or demands anything more. Whether the
dealer or manufacturer pays expenses at this rate, matters not; if,
after the maximum is fixed, he closes factory, or gives up business, we
declare him a "suspect;" we chain him down to his pursuit, we oblige
him to lose by it.--This is the way to clip the claws of beasts of prey,
little and big! But the claws grow out again, and, instead of paring
them down, it would probably be better to pull them out. Some amongst us
have already thought of that; the right of pre-emption shall be applied
to every article; "in each department, national storehouse might be
established where farmers, land-owners and manufacturers would be
obliged to deposit at a fixed price, paid down, the surplus of their
consumption of every species of merchandise. The nation would distribute
this merchandise to wholesale dealers, reserving a profit of six per
cent. The profit of the wholesale dealer would be fixed at eight per
cent and that of the retailer at twelve per cent."[2182] In this way,
farmers, manufacturers, and merchants would all become clerks of the
State, appointed on a premium or a discount; unable to gain a great
deal, they would not be tempted to gain too much; they would cease to be
greedy and soon cease to be egoists.[2183]--Since, fundamentally,
egoism is the capital vice and individual proprietorship the food that
nourishes it, why not suppress individual proprietorship altogether? Our
extreme logicians, with Babæuf at the head of them, go as far as that,
and Saint-Just seems to be of that opinion.[2184] We are not concerned
with the enacting of an Agrarian; the nation may reserve the soil to
itself and divide among individuals, not the soil, but its lease. The
outcome of this principle affords us a glimpse of an order of things in
which the State, sole proprietor of real-estate, sole capitalist, sole
manufacturer, sole trader, having all Frenchmen in its pay and service,
would assign to each one his task according to his aptitude, and
distribute to each one his rations according to his wants.[2185]--These
various uncompleted plans still float in a hazy distance but their
common purpose is clearly distinguishable.

"All which tends to center human passions on the vile, individual ego
must be repudiated or repressed;"[2186]

We should annihilate special interests, deprive the individual of
the motives and means for self-isolation, suppress preoccupations and
ambitions by which Man makes himself a focal point at the expense of the
real center, in short, to detach him from himself in order to attach him
wholly to the State.

This is why, disregarding the narrow egoism through which the individual
prefers himself to the community, we strive towards the enlarged egoism
by which the individual prefers the community to the group of which he
forms a part. Under no pretext must he separate himself from the whole,
at no price, must he be allowed to form for himself a small homeland
within the large one, for, by the affection he entertains for the small
one, he frustrates the objects of the large one. Nothing is worse than
political, civil, religious and domestic federalism; we combat it under
all its forms.[2187] In this particular, the Constituent Assembly has
paved the way for us, since it has broken up all the principal historic
or material groups by which men have separated themselves from the
masses and formed a band apart, provinces, clergy, nobles, parliaments,
religious orders and trades-unions. We complete its work, we destroy
churches, we suppress literary or scientific associations, educational
or benevolent societies, even down to financial companies.[2188] We
prohibit any departmental or commercial "local spirit:" we find

"odious and opposed to all principles, that, amongst municipalities,
some should be rich and others poor, that one should have immense
patrimonial possessions and another nothing but debts."[2189]

We regard these possessions as the nation's, and we place indebtedness
to the nation's account. We take grain from rich communes and
departments, to feed poor communes and departments. We build bridges,
roads and canals of each district, at the expense of the State;
"we centralize the labor of the French people in a broad, opulent
fashion."[2190] We want no more local interests, recollections,
dialects, idioms and patriotisms. Only one bond should subsist between
individuals, that which attaches them to the social body. We sunder all
others; we do not tolerate any special aggregation; we do the best we
can to break up the most tenacious of all, the family.--We 

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