the Bourse, April 25, 1795; ibid., 322, II., 105.--"Memoirs of Theobald
Wolf," vol. I., p.200, (February 3, 1796). At Havre, the louis d'or
is then worth five thousand francs, and the ecu of six francs in
proportion. At Paris (February 12), the louis d'or is worth six thousand
five hundred; a dinner for two persons at the Palais Royal costs one
thousand five hundred francs.--Mayer, ("Frankreich in 1796.") He gives
a dinner for ten persons which costs three hundred thousand francs in
assignats. At this rate a cab ride costs one thousand francs, and by the
hour six thousand francs.]
[Footnote 42102: "Correspondance de Mallet du Pan avec la cour de
Vienne," I., 253 (July 18, 1795). "It is not the same now as in the
early days of the Revolution, which then bore heavily only on certain
classes of society; now, everybody feels the scourge, hourly, in every
department of civil life. Goods and provisions advance daily (in price)
in much greater proportion than the decline in assignats.... Paris is
really a city of furnishing shops... The immense competition for these
objects raises all goods twenty five per cent. a week.... It is the same
with provisions. A sack of wheat weighing three quintals is now worth
nine thousand francs, a pound of beef thirty six francs, a pair of shoes
one hundred francs. It is impossible for artisans to raise their wages
proportionately with such a large and rapid increase."--Cf. "Diary of
Lord Malmesbury," III., 290 (October 27, 1796). After 1795, the gains
of the peasants, land owners and producers are very large; from 1792 to
1796 they accumulate and hide away most of the current coin. They were
courageous enough and smart enough to protect their hoard against the
violence of the revolutionary government; "hence, at the time of the
depreciation of assignats, they bought land extraordinarily cheap." In
1796 they cultivate and produce a great deal.]
[Footnote 42103: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 72. (Letter of the
administrators of the district of Montpelier to the Convention, Messidor
26, year II.) "Your decree of Nivôse 4 last, suppressed the 'maximum,'
which step, provoked by justice and the 'maximum,' did not have the
effect you anticipated." The dearth ceases, but there is a prodigious
increase in prices, the farmer selling his wheat at from four hundred
and seventy to six hundred and seventy francs the quintal.]
[Footnote 42104: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 71. (Deliberations of
the commune of Champs, canton of Lagny, Prairial 22, year III. Letter of
the procureur-syndic of Meaux, Messidor 3. Letter of the municipality of
Rozoy, Seine et Marne, Messidor 4.)--Ibid., AF., II., 74. (Letter of
the municipality of Emérainville, endorsed by the Directory of
Meaux, Messidor 14.) "The commune can procure only oat-bread for its
inhabitants, and, again, they have to go a long way to get this.
This food, of so poor a quality, far from strengthening the citizen
accustomed to agricultural labor, disheartens him and makes him ill,
the result being that the hay cannot be got in good time for lack of
hands."--At Champs, "the crop of hay is ready for mowing, but, for want
of food, the laborers cannot do the work."]
[Footnote 42105: Ibid., AF., II., 73. (Letter from the Directory of the
district of Dieppe, Prairial 22.)]
[Footnote 42106: Ibid. (Letter of the administrators of the district of
Louviers, Prairial 26.)]
[Footnote 42107: Ibid. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of the Caen
district, Caen, Messidor 23.--Letter of Representative Porcher to the
Committee of Public Safety, Messidor 26.--Letter of the same, Prairial
24. "The condition of this department seemed to me frightful.... The
privations of the department with respect to subsistence cannot be
over-stated to you; the evil is at its height."]
[Footnote 42108: Archives Nationales, AF. II., 74. (Letter of
the Beauvais administrators, Prairial 15.--Letter of the Bapaume
administrator, Prairial 24.--Letter of the Vervier administrator,
Messidor 7.--Letter of the commissary sent by the district of Laon,
Messidor.)--Cf., I6id., letter from the Abbeville district, Prairial 11.
"The quintal of wheat is sold at one thousand assignats, or rather,
the farmers will not take assignats any more, grain not to be had
for anything but coin, and, as most people have none to give they are
hard-hearted enough to demand of one his clothes, and of another his
furniture, etc."]
[Footnote 42109: Ibid., AF., II., 71. (Letter of the Rozoy municipality.
Seine-et-Marne, Messidor 4, year III.) A bushel of wheat in the vicinity
of Rozoy brings three hundred francs.]
[Footnote 42110: Ibid., AF., II., 74. (Letter of the Montreuil-sur-Mer
municipality, Prairial 29.)]
[Footnote 42111: Ibid. (Letter of the Vervins administrators, Prairial
11 Letter of the commune of La Chapelle-sur-Somme, Prairial 24.)]
[Footnote 42112: Ibid., AF., II., 70. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of
the district of Saint-Germain, Thermidor 10.) This file, which depicts
the situation of the communes around Paris, is specially heartrending
and terrible. Among other instances of the misery of workmen the
following petition of the men employed on the Marly water-works may be
given, Messidor 28. "The workmen and employees on the machine at Marly
beg leave to present to you the wretched state to which they are reduced
by the dearness of provisions. Their moderate wages, which at the most
have reached only five livres twelve sous, and again, for four months
past, having received but two francs sixteen sous, no longer provide
them with half a pound of bread, since it costs fifteen and sixteen
francs per pound. We poor people have not been wanting in courage nor
patience, hoping that times would mend. We have been reduced to selling
most of our effects and to eating bread made of bran of which a sample
is herewith sent, and which distresses us very much (nous incommode
beaucoup); most of us are ill and those who are not so are in a very
feeble state."--Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris," Thermidor 9. "Peasants on
the market square complain bitterly of being robbed in the fields and on
the road, and even of having their sacks (of grain) plundered."]
[Footnote 42113: Archives Nationales, D., P I, file 2. (Letter of the
Ervy municipality, Floréal 17, year III.) "The indifference of the
egoist farmers in the country is at its height; they pay no respect
whatever to the laws, killing the poor by refusing to sell, or unwilling
to sell their grain at a price they can pay."--(It would be necessary
to copy the whole of this file to show the alimentary state of the
departments.)]
[Footnote 42114: Ibid., AF., II., 74. (Letter of the district
administrators of Bapaume, Prairial 24.--Letter of the municipality of
Boulogne-sur-Mer, Prairial 24.)]
[Footnote 42115: Ibid.,, AF., II., 73. (Letter of the municipality of
Brionne, district of Bernay, Prairial 7.) The farmers do not bring
in their wheat because they sell it elsewhere at the rate of fifteen
hundred and two thousand francs the sack of three hundred and thirty
pounds.]
[Footnote 42116: Ibid., AF., II., 71. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of
the district of Meaux, Messidor 2.) "Their fate is shared by many of the
rural communes" and the whole district has been reduced to this dearth
"to increase the resources of Paris and the armies."]
[Footnote 42117: Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris." (Reports of the
Police, Pluviôse 6, year III.)--Ibid., Germinal 16. "A letter from the
department of Drome states that they are dying of hunger there, bread
selling at three francs the pound."]
[Footnote 42118: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 70. (Deliberations of
the council-general of Franciade, Thermidor 9, year III.)]
[Footnote 42119: Ibid. (Letter of the procureur-syndic of the district
of Saint-Germain, Thermidor 10.)--Delécluze, "Souvenirs de Soixante
Années," p. 10. (The Delécluze family live in Mendon in 1794 and for
most of 1795. M. Delécluze, senior, and his son go to Meaux and obtain
of a farmer a bag of good flour weighing three hundred and twenty five
pounds for about ten louis d'or and fetch it home, taking the greatest
pains to keep it concealed. Both father and son "after having covered
the precious sack with hay and straw in the bottom of the cart, follow
it on foot at some distance as the peasant drives along." Madame
Delécluze kneads the bread herself and bakes it.]
[Footnote 42120: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 74. The following shows
some of the municipal expenditures. (Deliberations of the commune of
Annecy, Thermidor 8, year II I.) "Amount received by the commune from
the government, 1,200,000 francs. Fraternal subscriptions, 400,000
francs. Forced loan, 2,400,000 francs. Amount arising from grain granted
by the government, but not paid for, 400,000 francs." (Letter from the
municipality of Lille, Fructidor 7 ) "The deficit, at the time we took
hold of the government, which, owing to the difference between the price
of grain bought and the price obtained for bread distributed among the
necessitous, had amounted to 2,270,023 francs, so increased in Thermidor
as to amount to 8,312,956 francs." consequently, the towns ruin
themselves with indebtedness to an incredible extent.--Archives
Nationales, AF., II., 72. (Letter of the municipality of Tours,
Vendémiaire 19, year IV.) Tours has not sufficient money with which to
buy oil for its street lamps and which are no longer lit at night. A
decree is passed to enable the agent for provisions at Paris to supply
its commissaries with twenty quintals of oil which, for three hundred
and forty lamps, keeps one hundred agoing up to Germinal 1. The same at
Toulouse. (Report of Destrene, Moniteur, June 24, 1798.) On November 26,
1794, Bordeaux is unable to pay seventy two francs for thirty barrels
of water to wash the guillotine. (Granier de Cassagnac, I., 13. Extract
from the archives of Bordeaux.) Bordeaux is authorized to sell one
thousand casks of wine which had formerly been taken on requisition
by the government, the town to pay for them at the rate at which the
Republic bought them and to sell them as dear as possible in the way of
regular trade. The proceeds are to be employed in providing subsistence
for its inhabitants. (Archives Nationales, AF., II., 72, orders of
Vendémiaire 4, year IV.) As to aid furnished by the assignats granted
to towns and departments cf. the same files; 400,000 francs to Poitiers,
Pluviôse 18, four millions to Lyons, Pluviôse 17, three millions a month
to Nantes, after Thermidor 14, ten millions to the department of Herault
in Frimaire and Pluviôse, etc.]
[Footnote 42121: Archives Nationales, II., P 1, file 2. (Deliberations
of the commune of Troyes, Ventôse 15, year III.)--"Un Sejour en France."
(Amiens, May 9, 1795.) "As we had obtained a few six franc crowns and
were able to get a small supply of wheat.... Mr. D and the servants eat
bread made of three fourths bran and one fourth flour. When we bake it
we carefully close the doors, paying no attention to the door bell,
and allow no visitor to come in until every trace of the operation is
gone... The distribution now consists of a mixture of sprouted wheat,
peas, rye, etc., which scarcely resembles bread." (April 12.) "The
distribution of bread (then) was a quarter of a pound a day. Many of
those who in other respects were well off, got nothing at all."]
[Footnote 42122: Ibid. (Letters of the municipality of Troyes, Ventôse
15, year III., and Germinal 6.) Letter of the three deputies, sent by
the municipality to Paris, Pluviôse, year III. (no date.)]
[Footnote 42123: "Un Sejour en France." (Amiens, Jan. 30, 1795.)
Archives Nationales. AF.,II., 74. (Deliberation of the commune of
Amiens, Thermidor 8, and Fructidor 7, year III.)]
[Footnote 42124: "Souvenirs et Journal d'un Bourgeois d'Evreux," p. 97.
(The women stop carts loaded with wheat, keep them all night, stone and
wound Representative Bernier, and succeed in getting, each, eight pounds
of wheat.)]
[Footnote 42125: Archives Nationales, AF.,II., 73. (Letter of the
municipality of Dieppe, Prairial 22.)--AF.,II., 74. (Letter of the
municipality of Vervins, Messidor 7. Letter of the municipality of
Lille, Fructidor 7.)]
[Footnote 42126: "Correspondance de Mallet du Pan avec la Cour de
Vienne," I., 90. Ibid., 131. One month later a quintal of flour at Lyons
is worth two hundred francs and a pound of bread forty-five sous.]
[Footnote 42127: Archives Nationales, AF., II., 13. (Letter of the
deputies extraordinary of the three administrative bodies of Chartres,
Thermidor 15: "In the name of this commune dying of hunger ")--"The
inhabitants of Chartres have not even been allowed to receive their
rents in grain; all has been poured into the government storehouses."]
[Footnote 42128: Ibid. (Petition of the commune of La Rochelle,
Fructidor 25, that of Painboeuf, Fructidor 9, that of the municipality of
Nantes, Thermidor 14, that of Rouen, Fructidor 1.)--Ibid., AF.,II, 72.
(Letter of the commune of Bayonne, Fructidor 1.) "Penury of provisions
for more than two years.... The municipality, the past six months, is
under the cruel necessity of reducing its subjects to half-a-pound
of corn-bread per day.... at the rate of twenty-five sous the pound,
although the pound costs over five francs." After the suppression of the
"maximum" it loses about twenty-five thousand francs per day.]
[Footnote 42129: Ibid. (Letter of Representative Porcher, Caen, Prairial
24, Messidor 3 and 26. Letter of the municipality of Caen, Messidor 3.)]
[Footnote 42130: Ibid. AF.,II., 71. (Letter of the municipality of
Auxerre, Messidor 19.) "We have kept alive thus far through all sorts of
expedients as if by miracle. It has required incalculable efforts, great
expenditure, and really supernatural means to accomplish it. But there
is still one month between this and the end of Thermidor. How are
we going to live! Our people, the majority of whom are farmers and
artisans, are rationed at half-a-pound a day for each person and this
will last but ten or twelve days at most."]
[Footnote 42131: Meissner, "Voyage à Paris," 339. "There was not a
morsel of bread in our inn. I went myself to five or six bakeries and
pastry shops and found them all stripped." He finds in the last
one about a dozen of small Savoy biscuits for which he pays fifteen
francs.--See, for the military proceedings of the government in relation
to bread, the orders of the Committee of Public Safety, most of them by
the hand of Lindet, AF., II., 68-74.]
[Footnote 42132: Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris," vols. II. and
III.,passim.]
[Footnote 42133: Archives Nationales, AF.,II., 68. (Orders of Ventôse
20, year III.; Germinal 19 and 20; Messidor 8, etc.)]
[Footnote 42134: ibid. Orders of Nivôse 5 and 22.]
[Footnote 42135: Ibid. Orders of Pluviôse 19, Ventôse 5, Floréal 4 and
24. (The fourteen brewers which the Republic keeps agoing for itself
at Dunkirk are excepted.)--The proceedings are the same in relation
to other necessary articles,--returns demanded of nuts, rape-seed, and
other seeds or fruits producing oil, also the hoofs of cattle and sheep,
with requisitions for every other article entering into the manufacture
of oil, and orders to keep oil-mills agoing. "All administrative
bodies will see that the butchers remove the fat from their meat before
offering it for sale, that they do not themselves make candles out of
it, and that they do not sell it to soap-factories, etc. "--(Orders of
Veridémiaire 28, year III.) The executive committee will collect eight
hundred yoke of oxen and distribute them among the dealers in hay in
order to transport wood and coal from the woods and collieries to the
yards. They will distribute proportionately eight hundred sets of wheels
and harness. The wagoners will be paid and guarded the same as military
convoys, and drafted as required. To feed the oxen, the district
administrators will take by pre-emption the necessary fields and
pasturages, etc." (Orders of Pluviôse 10, year III.)]
[Footnote 42136: Moniteur, XXIV., 397.--Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris."
(Reports of Frimaire 16, year IV.) "Citizens in the departments wonder
how it is that Paris costs them five hundred and forty six millions per
month merely for bread when they are starving. This isolation of Paris,
for which all the benefits of the Revolution are exclusively reserved.
has the worst effect on the public mind."--Meissner, 345.]
[Footnote 42137: Mercier, "Paris Pendant la Révolution," I.,
355-357.--Schmidt, "Pariser Zustande," I., 224. (The Seine is frozen
over on November 23 and January 23, the thermometer standing at sixteen
degrees (Centigrade) below zero.)--Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris."
(Reports of the Police, Pluviôse 2, 3 and 4.)]
[Footnote 42138: Schmidt, "Pariser Zustande," I., 228, and following
pages. (February 25, the distribution of bread is reduced to one and
one-half pounds per person; March 17, to one and onehalf pounds for
workmen and one pound for others. Final reduction to one-quarter of a
pound, March 31.)--Ibid., 251, for ulterior rates.--Dufort de Cheverney,
(MS. Mémoires, August, 1795.) M. de Cheverney takes up his quarters at
the old Louvre with his friend Sedaine. "I had assisted them with food
all I could: they owned to me that, without this, they would have died
of starvation notwithstanding their means."]
[Footnote 42139: Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris." (Reports of Germinal 15
and 27, and Messidor 28, year III., Brumaire 14 and Frimaire 23, year
IV.)--Ibid. (Germinal 15, year III.) Butter is at eight francs the
pound, eggs seven francs for four ounces.--Ibid., (Messidor 19) bread is
at sixteen francs the pound, (Messidor 28) butter at fourteen francs the
pound, (Brumaire 29) flour at 14,000 francs the bag of 325 pounds.]
[Footnote 42140: Ibid. (Report of Germinal 12, year III.) "The eating
houses and pastry-cooks are better supplied than ever."?"Memoires
(manuscript) of M. de Cheverney." "My sister-in-law, with more than
forty thousand livres income, registered in the 'Grand Ledger,' was
reduced to cultivating her garden, assisted by her two chambermaids.
M. de Richebourg, formerly intendant-general of the Post-Office, had to
sell at one time a clock and at another time a wardrobe to live on. 'My
friends,' he said to us one day, 'I have been obliged to put my clock in
the pot.' "--Schmidt. (Report of Frimaire 17, year IV.) "A frequenter of
the Stock-Exchange sells a louis at five thousand francs. He dines for
one thousand francs and loudly exclaims: 'I have dined at four francs
ten sous. They are really superb, these assignats! I couldn't have dined
so well formerly at twelve francs.'"]
[Footnote 42141: Schmidt. (Reports of Frimaire 9, year IV.) "The reports
describe the sad condition of those who, with small incomes and having
sold their clothes, are selling their furniture, being, so to say, at
their last piece; and, soon without anything, are reduced to the last
extremity by committing suicide."--Ibid., Frimaire 2, "The rentier
is ruined, not being able to buy food. Employees are all in the same
situation."--Naturally, the condition of employees and rentiters
grows worse with the depreciation of assignats. Here are house-keeping
accounts at the end of 1795. (Letter of Beaumarchais' sister Julie to
his wife, December, 1794. "Beaumarchais et son temps," by De Lomenie,
p.486.) "When you gave me those four thousand francs (assignats), my
dear friend, my heart went pit-a-pat. I thought that I should go crazy
with such a fortune. I put them in my pocket at once and talked about
other things so as to get the idea out of my mind. On returning to the
house, get some wood and provisions as quick as possible before prices
go higher! Dupont (the old domestic) started off and did his best. But
the scales fell from my eyes on seeing, not counting food for a month,
the result of those 4,275 francs:
1 load of wood 1460 francs
9 pounds of candles, from 8 to 100 francs per pound 900
4 pounds of sugar, at 100 francs per pound 400
3 measures of grain, at 40 francs 120
7 pounds oil, at 100 francs 700
12 wicks, at 5 francs 60
1 1/2 bushels potatoes, at 200 francs per bushel 300
1 month's washing 215
1 pound ground powder 70
2 ounces pomatum (formerly 3 sous, now 25 francs) 50
Sub-total 4,275 francs
There remains the month's supply of butter and eggs,
as you know, 200 francs, meat 25 or 30 francs, and
other articles in proportion 507
There was no bread for two days... I have bought only
four pounds the last two days, at 45 francs 180
Total 5,022 francs.
"When I think of this royal outlay, as you call it, which makes me
spend from18,000 to 20,000 francs for nothing, I wish the devil had
the system.... 10,000 francs which I have scattered about the past
fortnight, alarm and trouble me so much that I do not know how to
calculate my income in this way. In three days the difference (in the
value of assignats) has sent wood up from 4,200 to 6,500 francs, and
extras in proportion so that, as I wrote you, a load piled up and put
away costs me 7,100 francs. Every week now, the pot-au-feu and other
meats for ragouts, without any butter, eggs and other details, cost from
seven to eight hundred francs. Washing also goes up so fast that eight
thousand francs do not suffice. All this puts me out of humor, while in
all this expenditure I declare on my honor (je jure par la saine vérité
de mon coeur) that for two years I have indulged no fancy of my own or
spent anything except on household expenses. Nevertheless, I have urgent
need of some things for which I should require piles of assignats."--We
see by Beaumarchais' correspondence that one of his friends travels
around in the environs of Paris to find bread. "It is said here (he
writes from Soizy, June 5, 1795) that flour may be had at Briare. If
this were so I would bargain with a reliable man there to carry it to
you by water-carriage between Briare and Paris... In the mean time I
do not despair of finding a loaf."--Letter of a friend of Beaumarchais:
"This letter costs you at least one hundred francs, including paper,
pen, ink, and lamp-oil. For economy's sake I write it in your house."]
[Footnote 42142: Cf. Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris," vols. II. and III.
(Reports of the Police, at the dates designated.)]
[Footnote 42143: Dauban, "Paris en 1794," pp.562, 568, 572.]
[Footnote 42144: Mallet-Dupan, "Correspondance avec la cour de Vienne,"
I., 254. (July 18, 1795.)]
[Footnote 42145: Schmidt, ibid. (Report of Fructidor 3, year III.)]
[Footnote 42146: Schmidt, ibid., vols. II. and III. (Reports of the
police at the dates designated.)]
[Footnote 42147: Meissner, "Voyage à Paris," 132. Ibid., 104. "Bread
is made with coarse, sticky black flour, because they put in potatoes,
beans, Indian corn and millet, and moreover it is badly baked."--Granier
de Cassagnac, "Histoire du Directoire," I., 51. (Letter of M. Andot to
the author.) "There were three-quarter pound days, one-half pound and
one-quarter pound days and many at two ounces. I was a child of twelve
and used to go and wait four hours in the morning in a line, rue de
l'Ancienne Comédie. There was a fourth part of bran in the bread, which
was very tender and very soft.... and it contained one-fourth excess of
water. I brought back eight ounces of bread a day for the four persons
in our household."]
[Footnote 42148: Dauban, 586.]
[Footnote 42149: Schmidt, ibid. (Reports of Brumaire 24, and Frimaire
13, year IV.)]
[Footnote 42150: This state of misery is prolonged far beyond this
epoch in Paris and the provinces. ~f. Schmidt, "Tableaux de Paris,"
vol. III.-Felix Rocquam, "L'Etat de la France au 18e Brumaire," p.156.
(Report by Fourcroy, Nivôse 5, year IX.) Convoys of grain fail to reach
Brest because the English are masters at sea, while the roads on land
are impassable. "we are assured that the people of Brest have long been
on half-rations and perhaps on quarter-rations."]
[Footnote 42151: 1st It is difficult to arrive at even approximate
figures, but the following statements will render the idea clear. I.
Wherever I have compared the mortality of the Revolution with that of
the ancient regime I have found the former greater than the latter,
even in those parts of France not devastated by the civil war; and the
increase of this mortality is enormous, especially in years II. and
III.--At Troyes, with 25,282 inhabitants (in 1790), during the five
years of 1786, 1787, 1788, 1789 and 1792 (1790 and 1791 are missing),
the average annual mortality is 991 deaths, or 39 per thousand
inhabitants; during the years II, III, IV, this average is 1,166 or 47
per thousand inhabitants; the increase is then 7 deaths per year, nearly
one fifth. (Documents provided by M. Albert Babeau.)--At Rheims, the
average mortality from 1780 to 1789 is 1,350, which, for a population of
35,597, (1790), gives 41 deaths per annum to every thousand inhabitants.
In the year II., there are 1,836 deaths which gives for each of the two
years 64 deaths to every thousand persons; the increase is 23 deaths
a year, that is to say more than one-half above the ordinary rate.
(Statistics communicated by M. Jadart, archiviste at Rheims.)--At
Limoges, the yearly average of mortality previous to 1789 was 825 to
20,000 inhabitants, or at the rate of 41 to a thousand. From January 1,
1792, to September 22, 1794, there are 3,449 deaths, that is to say, a
yearly average of 63 deaths to one thousand inhabitants, that is to say,
22 extra per annum, while the mortality bears mostly on the poor, for
out of 2,073 persons who die between January 17, 1793, and September
22, 1794, over one-half, 1,100, die in the hospital.--(Louis Guibert,
"Ancien registre des paroisses de Limoges," pp. 40, 45, 47.)--At
Poitiers, in year IX., the population is 18,223, and the average
mortality of the past ten years was 724 per annum. But in year
II., there are 2,094 deaths, and in year III. 2,032, largely in the
hospitals. Thus, even on comparing the average mortality of the ten
years of the Revolution with the mortality of years II. and III., the
average rate has almost trebled.--The same applies to Loudens, where the
average death-rate being 151, in year II., it rises to 425. Instead
of the triple for Chatellerault, it is double, where, the average rate
being 262, the death-rate rises to 482, principally in the military
hospitals. ("Statistique de la Vienne," by Cochon, préfet, year
IX.)--At Niort, population 11,000, the annual mortality of the ten years
preceding 1793 averaged 423, or 38 per thousand. In year II., there
are 1,872, or 170 per thousand inhabitants, the number being more than
quadrupled. In year III., there are 1,122 deaths, or 122, which is
almost the triple. ("Statistique des Deux-Sèvres," by Dupin, prefet, 2nd
memorial, year IX.)--At Strasbourg, ("Recueil des Pièces Authentiques,"
etc., vol. I., p.32, declaration of the Municipality,) "twice as
many died last year (year II.) as during any of the preceding
years."--According to these figures and the details we have read, the
annual mortality during years II. and III. and most of year IV., may
be estimated as having increased one-half extra. Now, previous to 1789,
according to Moheau and Necker, (Peuchet, "Statistique elementaire de la
France," 1805, p.239,) the yearly mortality in France was one person
to every thirty, that is to say, 866,666 deaths to a population of 26
millions. One-half in addition to this for two and a half years gives,
consequently, one million and eighty thousand deaths.]
2nd. During the whole of the Directory episode, privation lasted and
the rate of mortality rose very high, especially for sick children,
the infirm and the aged, because the convention had confiscated the
possessions of the hospitals and public charity was almost null. For
example, at Lyons, "The Asylums having been deprived of sisters of
charity during years II., III. and IV., and most of year V., the
children gathered into them could neither be fed nor suckled and
the number that perished was frightful." ("Statistique du Rhone," by
Vernier, prefet, year X.)--In Necker's time, there were about eight
hundred asylums, hospitals and charitable institutions, with one hundred
thousand or one hundred and ten thousand inmates. (Peuchet, ibid., 256.)
For lack of care and food they die in myriads, especially foundlings,
the number of which increases enormously: in 1790, the figures do not
exceed 23,000; in year IX., the number surpasses 62,000, (Peuchet, 260):
"It is a 'perfect deluge,'" say the reports; in the department of Aisne,
there are 1,097 instead of 400; in that of Lot-et-Garonne, fifteen
hundred, (Statistiques des préfets de l'Aisne, Gers, Lot-et-Garonne),
and they are born only to die. In that of Eure, after a few months, it
is six out of seven; at Lyons, 792 out of 820; (Statistique des Prefets
du Rhone et de l'Eure). At Marseilles, it is ´600 out of 618; at Toulon,
101 out of 104; in the average, 19 out of 20. (Rocquam, "Etat de France
au 18e Brumaire," p.33. Report of François de Nantes.) At Troyes, out of
164 brought in in year IV., 134 die; out of 147 received in year VII.,
136 die. (Albert Babeau, II., 452.) At Paris, in year IV., out of 3,122
infants received 2,907 perish. (Moniteur, year V., No. 231.)--The sick
perish the same. "At Toulon, only seven pounds of meat are given each
day to eighty patients; I saw in the civil Asylum," says François de
Nantes, "a woman who had just undergone a surgical operation to whom
they gave for a restorative a dozen beans on a wooden platter." (Ibid.,
16, 31, and passim, especially for Bordeaux, Caen, Alençon, St.
Lô, etc.)--As to beggars, these are innumerable: in year IX., it is
estimated that there are 3 or 4,000 by department, at least 300,000 in
France. "In the four Brittany departments one can truly say that a third
of the population live at the expense of the other two-thirds, either by
stealing from them or through compelling assistance." (Rocquain, "Report
by Barbé-Marbois," p.93.)]
3rd. In year IX., the Consells-generaux are called upon to ascertain
whether the departments have increased or diminished in population since
1789. ("Analyse des procés-verbaux des Conseils-Generaux de l'an XI." In
four volumes.) Out of 58 which reply, 37 state that the population
with them has diminished; 12, that it has increased; 9, that it remains
stationary. Of the 22 others, 13 attribute the maintenance or increase
of population, at least for the most part, to the multiplication of
early marriages in order to avoid conscription and to the large number
of natural children.--Consequently, the average rate of population is
kept up not through preserving life, but through the substitution of new
lives for the old ones that are sacrificed. Bordeaux, nevertheless,
lost one-tenth of its population, Angers one-eighth, Pau one-seventh,
Chambery one-fourth, Rennes one-third. In the departments where the
civil-war was carried on, Argenton-Château lost two-thirds of its
population, Bressuire fell from 3,000 to 630 inhabitants; Lyons,
after the siege, fell from a population of 140,000 thousand to 80,000.
("Analyse des procés-verbaux des Conseils-Generaux" and Statistiques des
Prefets.")]
[Footnote 42152: Lareveillère-Lepeaux, "Mémoires." I, 248. (He belongs
to the Committee and is an eye-witness.)]
BOOK FIFTH. THE END OF THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT.
CHAPTER I. THE CONVENTION.
I. The Convention.
The Convention after Thermidor 9.--Reaction against the
Terrorists.--Aversion to the Constitutionalists.--The danger
they run if they lose power.
Nevertheless they too, these glutted sovereigns, are anxious, and very
much so, we have just seen why; it's a question of remaining in office
in order to remain alive, and henceforth this is their sole concern.--A
good Jacobin, up to the 9th of Thermidor, could, by shutting his eyes,
still believe in his creed.[5101] After the 9th of Thermidor,
unless born blind, like Soubrany, Romme and Goujon, a fanatic whose
intellectual organs are as rigid as the limbs of a fakir, nobody in the
Convention can any longer believe in the Contrat-Social, in a despotic
equalizing socialism, in the merits of Terror, in the divine right of
the pure. For, to escape the guillotine of the pure, the purest had to
be guillotined, Saint-Just, Couthon and Robespierre, the high-priest of
the sect. That very day the "Montagnards," in giving up their doctor,
abandoned their principles, and there is no longer any principle or
man to which the Convention could rally. In effect, before guillotining
Robespierre and his associates as orthodox, it guillotined the
Girondins, Hébert and Danton, as heretics. Now, "the existence of
popular idols and of head charlatans is irrevocably ended."[5102]
Ever the same conventional symbol before the empty sanctuary in the
blood-stained temple, and ever the same loud-intoned anthem; but faith
is gone, and only the acolytes remain to drone out the revolutionary
litany, old train-bearers and swingers of incense, the subaltern
butchers who, through a sudden stroke, have become pontiffs; in short,
the valets of the church who have donned the mitres and croziers of
their masters after having assassinated them.
From month to month, under the pressure of public opinion, they detach
themselves from the worship at which they have officiated, for, however
blunted or perverted their consciences, they cannot avoid admitting that
Jacobinism, as they have practiced it, was the religion of robbery and
murder. Previous to Thermidor an official phraseology[5103] drowned with
its doctrinal roar the living truth, while each Conventional sacristan
or beadle, confined to his own chapel, saw clearly only the human
sacrifices in which he himself had taken part. After Thermidor, the
friends and kindred of the dead, the oppressed, make their voices heard,
and he is forced to see collectively and in detail all the crimes to
which, nearly or remotely, he has contributed either through his assent
or through his vote, the same as in Mexico, the priest of Huichilobos
walks about in the midst of the six hundred thousand skulls amassed in
the vaults of his temple.--In quick succession, during the whole of year
III., through the freedom of the press and the great public discussions,
the truth becomes known. First, comes an account of the funereal
journey of one hundred and thirty-two Nantese, dragged from Nantes to
Paris,[5104] and the solemn acquittal, received with transports, of
the ninety-four who survive. After this, come the trials of the most
prominent terrorists, that of Carrier and the Revolutionary Committee of
Nantes, that of Fouquier-Tinville and the old revolutionary Tribunal
of Paris, that of Joseph Lebon,[5105] and, during thirty or forty
consecutive sessions, hundreds of minute, verified depositions ending
in the most complete and satisfactory testimony.--In the mean time,
revelations multiply at the tribune of the Convention; these consist of
the letters of the new representatives on mission and the denunciations
of the towns against their overthrown tyrants; against Maignet,
Dartigoyte, Piochefer-Bernard, Levasseur, Crassous, Javogues, Lequinio,
Lefiot, Piorry, Pinet, Monestier, Fouché, Laplanche, Lecarpentier,
and many others. Add to these the reports of commissions charged
with examining into the conduct of old dictators, Collot d'Herbois,
Billaud-Varennes, Barère, Amar, Vouland, Vadier and David, the reports
of the representatives charged with investigating certain details of the
abolished system, that of Grégoire on revolutionary vandalism, that
of Cambon on revolutionary taxes, that of Courtois on Robespierre's
papers.--All these rays combine in a terrible illumination which imposes
itself even on the eyes that turn away from it: It is now but too plain
that France, for fourteen months, has been devastated by a gang of
bandits. All that can be said in favor of the least perverted and the
least vile is that they were born so, or had become crazy.[5106]--The
majority of the Convention cannot evade this growing testimony and the
Montagnards excite its horror; and all the more, because it bears them
a grudge: the 73 who were imprisoned and the sixteen who were proscribed
have resumed their seats, the 400 silent who have for so long held their
seats under the knife, remember the oppression to which they have
been subject. They now recover and turn first against the most
tainted scoundrels, and then against the members of the old
committees.--Whereupon the "Mountain," as was its custom, launches its
customary supporters, the starved populace, the Jacobin rabble, in the
riots of Germinal and Prairial, in year III., and proclaims anew the
reign of Terror; the Convention again sees the knife over its head.
Saved by young men, by the National Guard, it becomes courageous through
fear, and, in its turn, it terrorizes the terrorists. The Faubourg
Saint-Antoine is disarmed, ten thousand Jacobins are arrested,[5107]
and more than sixty Montagnards are decreed under indictment; Collot,
Billaud, Barère and Vadier are to be deported; nine other members
of former committees are to be imprisoned. The last of the veritable
fanatics, Romme, Goujon, Soubrany, Duquesnoy, Bourbotte and Duroy are
condemned to death, Immediately after the sentence five of them stab
themselves on the stairs of the tribunal; two of the wounded who survive
are borne, along with the sixth, to the scaffold and guillotined. Two
Montagnards of the same stamp, Rhul and Maure, kill themselves before
their sentence.--Henceforth the purged Convention regards itself as
pure; its final rigor has expiated its former baseness, the guilty blood
which it spills washing away the stains of the innocent blood it had
shed before.
Unfortunately, in condemning the terrorists, it pronounced its own
condemnation; for it has authorized and sanctioned all their crimes. On
its benches, in its committees, often in the president's chair, at
the head of the ruling coterie, still figure the members of the
revolutionary government, many of the avowed terrorists like Bourdon
de l'Oise, Bentabolle, Delmas, and Reubell; presidents of the September
commune like Marie Chénier; those who carried out "the 31st of May,"
like Legendre and Merlin de Douai, author of the decree which created
six hundred thousand suspects in France; provincial executioners of
the most brutal and most ferocious sort, the greatest and most
cynical robbers like André Dumont, Fréron, Tallien and Barras. Under
Robespierre, the four hundred mutes "du ventre" were the reporters,
the voters, the claqueurs, and the agents of the worst decrees against
religion, property and persons. The foundations of Terror were all laid
by the seventy-three in confinement before they were imprisoned, and by
the sixteen who were proscribed before their proscription. Excepting
ten or a dozen who stayed away, the Convention, in a mass, pronounced
judgment against the King and declared him guilty; more than one-half of
the Convention, the Girondists at the head of them, voted his death.
The hall does not contain fifty honorable men in whom character sustains
conscience, and who had a right to carry their heads erect.[5108] In no
law they passed, good or bad, did the other seven hundred have in view
the interests of their constituents. In all their laws, good or bad,
they solely regarded their own interests. So long as the attacks of the
"Mountain" and of the rabble affected the public only, they lauded them,
decreed them and had them executed. If they finally rebelled against
the "Mountain," and against the rabble, it was at the last moment,
and solely to save their lives. Before, as after the 9th of Thermidor,
before, as after the 1st of Prairial, the incentives of the conduct of
these pusillanimous oppressors or involuntary liberators were baseness
and egoism. Hence, "the contempt and horror universally poured out
against them; only Jacobins could be still more odious!"[5109] If
further support is given to these faithless mandatories, it is because
they are soon to be put out. On the premature report that the
Convention is going to break up, people accost each other in the street,
exclaiming, "We are rid of these brigands, they are going at last...
People caper and dance about as if they could not repress their joy;
they talk of nothing but the boy, (Louis XVIII. confined in the Temple),
and the new elections. Everybody agrees on excluding the present
deputies.... There is less discussion on the crimes which each has
committed than on the insignificance of the entire assemblage, while the
epithets of vicious, used up and corrupt have almost wholly given way to
thieves and scoundrels."[5110] Even in Paris, during the closing months
of their rule, they hardly dare appear in public: "in the dirtiest and
most careless costume which the tricolor scarf and gold fringe makes
more apparent, they try to escape notice in the crowd[5111] and, in
spite of their modesty, do not always avoid insult and still less the
maledictions of those who pass them."--In the provinces, at home, it
would be worse for them; their lives would be in danger; in any event,
they would be dragged through the gutter, and this they know. Save about
"twenty of them," all who are not to succeed in entering the new
Corps Legislatif, will intrigue for offices in Paris and become "state
messengers, employees in bureaux, and ushers to ministers;" in default
of other places they would accept those of "hall-sweeps." Any refuge
for them is good against the reprobation of the public, which is already
rising and submerging them under its tide.
II. Re-election of the Two-thirds.
Decrees for the re-election of the Two-thirds.--Small number
of Voters.--Maneuvers for preventing electors from voting on
the decrees.--Frauds in the returns of votes.--Maintenance
of the decrees by force.--Recruiting of the Roughs.--The
military employed.--The 13th of Vendémaire.
There is no other refuge for them except in supreme power, and no other
means for maintaining this but in the excesses of despotism, dishonesty,
mendacity and violence. In the Constitution they manufacture, they
desire to remain the sovereigns of France and they decree[5112] at
once that, willingly or not, France must select two-thirds of its
new representatives from amongst them, and, that she may make a good
selection, it is prudent to impose the selection upon her. There is a
show, indeed, of consulting her in the special decrees which deprive her
of two-thirds of her elective rights but, as in 1792 and in 1793, it
is so contrived that she consents, or seems to consent, to this
arrangement.[5113]--In the first place, they relied on the majority of
electors abstaining from a response. Experience indeed, had shown that,
for a long time, the masses were disgusted with the plebiscite farces;
moreover, terror has stifled in individuals all sentiment of a common
interest;[5114] each cares for himself alone. Since Thermidor, electors
and mayors in the boroughs and in the rural districts are found with a
good deal of difficulty, even electors of the second degree; people
saw that it was useless and even dangerous to perform the duties of
a citizen; they would have nothing to do with public functions. A
foreigner writes,[5115] after traversing France from Bourg-en-Bresse to
Paris: "Ninety times out of a hundred that I have asked the question,
'Citizen, what was done in the primary meeting of your canton?'
the answer would be:
'Me, citizen, what have I to do with it? I' faith, they had hard work to
agree!'
Or,
'What's the use? There were not many there! Honest folks stayed at
home.'"
In fact, out of at least six million electors convoked, five millions
do not come near the ballot-box, there being no embarrassment in this
matter as they do not vote.[5116]
In the second place, precautions have been taken to prevent those who
come to vote on the Constitution from entertaining the idea of voting on
the decrees. No article of the Constitution, nor in the decrees, calls
upon them to do so; slight inducement is held out to them to come, in
a vague style, through an oratorical interrogation, or in a tardy
address.[5117]--In addition to this, on the printed blanks sent to them
from Paris, they find but three columns, one for the number of votes
accepting the Constitution, another for the number rejecting it, and
the third for "written observations" in case there are any. There are no
special columns for marking the number of votes accepting or rejecting
the decrees. Thereupon, many illiterate or ill-informed electors might
think that they were convoked to vote solely on the Constitution and not
at all on the decrees, which is just what happened, and especially in
the remote departments, and in the rural assemblies. Moreover, many
assemblies, nearer Paris and in the towns, comprehend that if the
Convention consults them it is only for form's sake; to give a negative
answer is useless and perilous; it is better to keep silent; as soon as
the decrees are mentioned they very prudently "unanimously" demand the
order of the day.[5118] Hence out of five primary assemblies on the
average which vote for or against the Constitution, there is only one
which votes for or against the decrees.[5119]--Such is the mode of
getting at the voice of the nation. Apparently, it is induced to speak;
in practice, its silence is ensured.
The last and most ingenious expedient of all: when a primary assembly
speaks too loudly it is taken for granted that it kept silent. In Paris,
where the electors are more clear sighted and more decided than in the
provinces, in eighteen well-known departments, and probably in many
others, the electors who voted on the decrees almost all voted against
them; in many cases, even their minutes state that the negative vote was
"unanimous," but the minutes fail to state the exact number of the noes.
On this, in the total of noes hostile to the decrees, these noes are not
counted.[5120] Through this trickery, the Convention, in Paris alone,
reduced the number of negatives by 50,000 and the same in the provinces,
after the fashion of a dishonest steward who, obliged to hand in
an account, falsifies the figures by substituting subtractions for
additions.-Such is the way, in relation to the decrees, in which, out of
the 300,000 votes which it accepts, it is able to announce 200,000
yeas and 100,000 noes and thus proclaim that its master, the sovereign
people, after giving it a general acquittance, a discharge in full,
invests it anew with its confidence and expressly continues its mandate.
It now remains to keep by force this power usurped by
fraud.--Immediately after the suppression of the Jacobin riots the
Convention, menaced on the right, turns over to the left; it requires
allies, persons of executive ability. It takes them wherever it can find
them, from the faction which decimated it before Thermidor and which,
since Thermidor, it decimates. Consequently, its executive committee
suspends all proceedings begun against the principal "Montagnards;" a
number of terrorists, former presidents of the sections, "the matadors
of the quarter," arrested after Prairial 1, are set free at the end of a
month. They have good arms, are accustomed to vigorous striking without
giving warning, especially when honest folks are to be knocked down or
ripped open. The stronger public opinion is against the government the
more does the government rely on men with bludgeons and pikes, on
the strikers "turned out of the primary assemblies," on the heroes
of September 2 and May 31, dangerous nomads, inmates of Bicêtre,
paid assassins out of employment, and roughs of the Quinze-Vingts and
faubourg Saint--Antoine.[5121] Finally on the 11th of Vendémiaire, it
gathers together fifteen or eighteen hundred of them and arms them in
battalions.[5122] Such brigands are they, that Menon, "major-general of
the army of the interior and commandant of the armed force of Paris,"
comes the next day with several of his staff-officers and tells the
Committee of Five that he "will not have such bandits in his army nor
under his orders". "I will not march with a lot of rascals and assassins
organized in battalions "under the name of "patriots of '89." Indeed,
the true patriots of '89 are on the other side, the constitutionalists
of 1791, sincere liberals, "forty thousand proprietors and merchants,"
the elite and mass of the Parisian population,[5123] "the majority of
men really interested in public matters," and at this moment, the common
welfare is all that concerns them. Republic or royalty is merely
a secondary thought, an idea in the back-ground; nobody dreams of
restoring the ancient régime; but very few are preoccupied with the
restoration of a limited monarchy.[5124] "On asking those most in
earnest what government they would like in place of the Convention, they
reply 'We want that no longer, we want nothing belonging to it; we want
the Republic and honest people for our rulers.'"[5125]--That is all;
their uprisal is not a political insurrection against the form of the
government, but a moral insurrection against the criminals in office.
Hence, on seeing the Convention arm their old executioners, "the tigers"
of the Reign of Terror, admitted malefactors, against them, they cannot
contain themselves.[5126] "That day," says a foreigner, who visited
many public places in Paris, "I saw everywhere the deepest despair, the
greatest expression of rage and fury.... Without that unfortunate order
the insurrection would probably not have broken out." If they take
up arms it is because they are brought back under the pikes of the
Septembriseurs, and under Robespierre's axe.--But they are only national
guards; most of them have no guns;[5127] they are in want of gunpowder,
those who have any having only five or six charges; "the great majority
do not think of fighting;" they imagine that "their presence is merely
needed to enforce a petition;" they have no artillery, no positive
leader; it is simply excitement, precipitation, disorder and mistaken
maneuvers.[5128] On the contrary, on the side of the Convention, with
Henriot's old bullies, there are eight or nine thousand regular troops,
and Bonaparte; his cannon, which rake the rue Saint Honoré and the Quai
Voltaire, mow down five or six hundred sectionists. The rest disperse,
and henceforth the check-mated Parisians are not to take up their guns
against the Jacobin faction whatever it does.
III. A Directory of Regicides.
The Directory chosen among the regicides.--It selects agents
of its own species.--Leading Jacobins are deprived of their
civic rights.--The Terrorists are set free and restored to
their civic rights.--Example at Blois of these releases and
of the new administrative staff.
Supreme authority is now once more in the hands of the revolutionary
band.--In conformity with its decrees of Fructidor, it first obliges
electors to take two-thirds of their new representatives from the
Convention. And as, notwithstanding its decrees, the electoral
assemblies have not re-elected a sufficient number of the
Conventionalists, it nominates itself, from a list prepared by its
Committee of Public Safety, the one hundred and four which are lacking:
In this way, both in the council of the Five Hundred, as well as in the
council of the Ancients, it secures a clear majority in both the houses
of the Legislative Corps. In the executive branch, in the Directory, it
assures itself of unanimity. The Five Hundred, by adroitly preparing the
lists, impose their candidates on the Ancients, selecting the five names
beforehand: Barras, La Révellière de Lépeaux, Reubell, Letourneur and
Siéyès, and then, on Siéyès refusing, Carnot. All of them are regicides
and, under this terrible qualification, bound at the risk of their
heads, to maintain the regicide faction in power.--Naturally the
Directory chooses its agents from among their own people,[5129] their
ministers and the employees of their departments, ambassadors and
consuls, officers of all ranks, collectors of taxes direct and indirect,
administrators of the national domains, commissioners of civil and
Criminal courts, and the commissioners of the departmental and municipal
administrations. Again, having the right to suspend and dismiss all
elected administrative bodies, it exercises this right. If the local
authorities of any town, canton, or department seem to be anti-Jacobin,
it sets them aside and, either on its own authority, or with the assent
of the Legislative Corps, replaces them with Jacobins on the spot.[5130]
In other respects, the Convention has done its best to relieve its
clients of their principal adversaries and most popular rivals. The
night before its dissolution, it excluded from every "legislative,
municipal, administrative and judicial function,"[5131] even that of
juryman, not only the individuals who, rightly or wrongly, had been
put on a list of émigrés and not yet stricken off, but likewise their
fathers, sons and grandsons, brothers and brothers-in-law, their
connections of the same degree, uncles and nephews. In all, probably two
or three hundred thousand Frenchmen, nearly the whole of the élite of
the nation. To this it adds the rest of this élite, all the honest
and energetic who, in the late primary or electoral assemblies have
"provoked or signed" any manifestation against its despotism; if still
in office they are to resign within twenty-four hours, or be sent into
perpetual exile.--Through this legal incapacity of the anti-Jacobins,
the field is free to the Jacobins. In many places, for lack of
candidates that please them, most of the electors stay away from the
polls; besides this, the terrorists resort to their old system, that is
to say to brutal violence.[5132] On again obtaining the support of
the government they have raised their heads and are now the titular
favorites. The Convention has restored to them the civic rights of which
they had deprived their adversaries: "every decree of indictment or
arrest" rendered against them, "every warrant executed or not,
all proceedings and suits" begun, every sentence bearing on their
revolutionary acts, is cancelled. The most "atrocious" Montagnards, the
most sanguinary and foul proconsuls, Dartigoyte and Piochefer-Bernard,
Darthé, Lebon's secretary, Rossignol the great September massacrer,
the presidents of former revolutionary committees, "patriotic robbers,
seal-breakers" and garroters, brazenly promenade the streets of
Paris.[5133] Barère himself, who, condemned to transportation,
universally execrated as he traverses France, and who, everywhere on his
journey, at Orleans, Tours, Poitiers, Niort, comes near being torn to
pieces by the people, Barère is not sent off to Guienne; he is
allowed to escape, to conceal himself and live tranquilly at Bordeaux.
Furthermore, Conventionalists of the worst species, like Monestier and
Foussedoire return to their natal department to govern it as government
commissioners.
Consider the effect of these releases and of these appointments in a
town which, like Blois, has seen the assassins at work, and which, for
two months, follows their trial.[5134]--Seven of them, members of the
Revolutionary Committee, commanders of the armed force, members of the
district or department, national agents in Indre-et-Loire, charged with
conducting or receiving a column of eight hundred laborers, peasant
women, priests and "suspects," cause nearly six hundred of them to be
shot, sabered, drowned or knocked down on the road, not in self-defense
or to prevent escape, for these poor creatures tied two and two marched
along like sheep without a murmur, but to set a good revolutionary
example, so as to keep the people in proper subjection by terror and
enable them to line their pockets.[5135] A minute investigation has
unfolded before the judges, jury and public of Blois a long series of
authentic facts and proofs, with eight days of pleading and the most
complete and glaring evidence; the sentence is about to be pronounced.
Suddenly, two weeks before Vendémiaire 13, a decree annuls the
proceedings, which have already cost over 600,000 livres, and orders a
new trial in another form. Next, after Vendémiaire 13, a representative
arrives at Blois and his first care is to set the butchers free.--About
thirty knaves ruled the town during the reign of Terror, all strangers,
save four or five, "all more or less befouled with crime." At first, the
principal slaughterers:
* Hézine, Gidouin, and their accomplices of the neighboring districts,
* Simon and Bonneau the ex-mayor of Blois,
* Bézard, a former soldier, convicted of peculation and of robbing
cellars which he had put under sequestration,
* Berger, an ex-monk, and then dragoon who, with pistol in hand, forced
the superior of his old convent to give up the funds of the community,
* Giot, formerly a chief-butler of Monsieur (the King's brother), next,
a judge in the September massacres and then a quartermaster in the
Pyrenees army and a pillager in Spain, then secretary to the Melun
tribunal of which he stole the cash, along with other nomads and
outlaws of the same stamp, most of them sots and roisterers, one
an ex-schoolmaster, another an ex-ladies hair-dresser, another an
ex-chair-bearer; all of them a vile lot, chosen by the government for
its agents, and, under new titles, resuming their old positions. At
the head of the armed force is Gen. Bonnard, who is accompanied by a
prostitute and who passes his time in orgies, pilfering wherever he can,
and so shameless in his thievery as to be condemned, six months later,
to three months in irons.[5136] On arriving at Blois, he organizes "a
paid guard, composed of all the most abject Jacobins."--Elsewhere,
as here,[5137] it is the full staff of the reign of Terror, the petty
potentates dethroned after Thermidor, the political Bohemians restored
to their functions.
IV. Public Opinon.
Resistance of public opinion.--Elections, year IV. at Paris
and in the provinces.--The Directory threatened by ultra
Jacobins.--Forced amelioration of the Jacobin
administration.
So, that after Vendémiaire 13, it looks as if the Jacobin band had made
the conquest of France a second time. This, however not yet so, for,
if it has recovered its authority, it has not yet recovered the
dictatorship.--In vain do Barras and Tallien, Dubois-Crancé, Merlin de
Douai and Marie Chénier, Delmas, Louvet, Siéyès and their corrupt gang,
the habitués of power, the despotic, unscrupulous theorists, try to
postpone indefinitely the opening of the legislative bodies, to annul
the elections, to purge the Convention, to restore for their own
advantage that total concentration of powers which, under the title of
revolutionary government, has converted France into a pachalic[5138]
in the hands of the old Committee of Public Safety.[5139] But the
Convention has become frightened for its own safety; at the last moment
the plot is exposed, and the blow frustrated.[5140] The Constitution,
decreed, is put in operation, and a system of the law has replaced the
system of arbitrariness. The Jacobin invasion, through that alone, is
checked and then arrested. The nation is in a condition to defend itself
and does defend itself. It gradually regains lost ground, even at the
center.--At Paris, the electoral body,[5141] which is obliged to take
two-thirds of its deputies from the Convention, takes none of the
regicide deputation representing Paris. All who are chosen, Lanjuinais,
Larivière, Fermon, Saladin, Boissy d'Anglas, wished to save the King,
and nearly all were proscribed after the 31st May. The departments show
the same spirit. The members of the Convention for whom the provinces
show a decided preference are the most prominent of the anti-Jacobins:
Thibaudeau is re-elected by 32 electoral colleges, Pelet de la Lozére
by 71, Boissy d'Anglas by 72, Lanjuinais by 73. As to the 250 of the new
third, these are liberals of 1789 or moderates of 1791,[5142] most of
them honorable men and many of them well-informed and of real merit,
jurisconsults, officers, administrators, members of the Constitutional
Assembly or Feuillants in the Legislative Assembly, Mathieu
Dumas, Vaublanc, Dupont de Nemours, Siméon, Barbé-Marbois and
Tronçon-Ducoudray. The capital, especially, chose Dambray, former
general-advocate to the Paris parliament, and Pastoret, former minister
of Louis XVI.. Versailles sends the two celebrated lawyers who defended
the King before the Convention, Tronchet and De Séze.--Now, previous to
the 13th Vendémiaire, two hundred members of the Convention had already
heartily sided with the Parisian electors[5143] against the terrorists.
This creates a strong opposition minority inside the Legislative Corps
which function protected by the Constitution. Hidden behind it and
behind them, the élite and the plurality of Frenchmen wait for better
days. The Directory is obliged to act cautiously with this large group,
so well supported by public opinion, and, accordingly, not to govern à
la Turk. So they respect, if not the spirit, at least the letter of the
law, and not to exercise a too barefaced influence on local elections.
Hence most of the local elections remain free, so that the nation,
* in spite of the decree excluding every relation of an émigré and every
notorious opponent of the government from present and future offices,
* in spite of fear, lassitude and disgust,
* in spite of the small number of votes, the rarity of candidates and
the frequent refusal of the elected to serve,[5144]
substantially exercises its privilege of electing its administrators
and judges according to its preferences. Consequently, the very
large majority of new administrators in the departments, cantons and
municipalities, and the very large majority of new civil and criminal
judges and justices of the peace are, like the new third of the
Convention, highly esteemed or estimable men. They are untainted with
excesses, still preserving their hopes of 1789, but preserved from the
outset against, or soon cured of, the revolutionary fever. Every decree
of spoliation or persecution loses some of its force in their hands.
Supported by the steady and manifest will of their present constituents,
we see them resisting the commissioners of the Directory, at least
protesting against their exactions and brutality, gaining time in favor
of the proscribed, dulling the point of, or turning aside, the Jacobin
sword.
Again, on the other hand, the government which holds this sword dare
not, like the Committee of Public Safety, thrust it in up to the hilt.
If wielded as before it might slip from its grasp. The furious in its
own camp are ready to wrest it away and turn the blade against it. It
must defend itself against the reviving clubs, against Babeuf and his
accomplices, against the desperadoes who, through a nocturnal attempt,
try to stir up the Grenelle camp: in Paris, there are four or five
thousand now ready to undertake a "civic St. Bartholomew," with the
old Conventionists who could not get themselves elected, at their
head,--Drouet, Amar, Vadier, Ricord, Laignelot, Chaudieu, Huguet,
Cusset, Javogues. Alongside of them, the friends of Chalier,
Robespierre's and Marat's followers, and the disciples of Saint-Just,
Bertrand de Lyon, Buonarotti, Antonelle, Rossignol and Babeuf. Behind
them, the bandits of the street, those "who gutted houses during the
Revolution," peculators or Septembriseurs out of employment, in short,
the relics of the terrorist gang or of the revolutionary army. Their
plan, true to their precedents, character and principles, consists not
only in despatching "the rascals who keep coaches, the moneyed men and
monopolisers," all the deputies and functionaries who do not resign at
the first summons, but also, and especially, in killing "the General of
the Interior, his staff, the seven ministers and the five 'cocked-hats'
(panachés) of the Luxembourg," that is to say, the five Directors
themselves. Such allies are troublesome. Undoubtedly, the government,
which considers them as its forlorn hope, and that it may have need
of them in a crisis, spares them as much as possible.[5145] It allows
Drouet to escape, and lets the trial of the Babouvists drag along, only
two of them being guillotined, Babeuf and Darthé; most of the others are
acquitted or escape. Nevertheless, for its own salvation, it is led
to separate from the fiercest Jacobins and draw near to peaceable
citizens.--Through this internal discord of the ruling faction, honest
people hold on the offices they occupy on the elections of the year
IV.. No decree comes to deprive them of their legal arms, while, in the
Legislative Corps, as in the administrations and the tribunals, they
count on carrying new positions in the elections of the year V.
V. Actual aim of Jacobin Activities: Power and Wealth.
Elections of year V.--Character and sentiments of the
elected.--The new majority in the Corps Legislatif.--Its
principles and program.--Danger and anxiety of the Jacobin
minority.--Indecision, division, scruples and weakness of
the moderate party.--Decision, want of scruples, force and
modes of procedure of the Jacobin faction.--The 18th of
Fructidor.
"It was a long time," writes a small trader of Evreux, "since so many
people were seen at the elections.[5146].... The eight electors for the
town obtained at the first ballot the absolute majority of suffrages....
Everybody went to the polls so as to prevent the nomination of any
elector among the terrorists, who had declared that their reign was
going to return."--In the environs of Blois, a rural proprietor, the
most circumspect and most peaceable of men, notes in his journal[5147]
that "now is the time to take a personal interest.. .. Every
sound-thinking man has promised not to refuse any office tendered to
him so as to keep out the Jacobins..... It is reasonably hoped that
the largest number of the electors will not be terrorists and that the
majority of the Legislative Corps being all right, the minority of the
furious, who have only one more year of office, will give way (in 1798)
to men of probity not steeped in crime.. .. In the country, the Jacobins
have tried in vain: people of means who employed a portion of the
voters, obtained their suffrages, every proprietor wishing to have
order.... The Moderates have agreed to vote for no matter what
candidate, provided he is not a Jacobin.... Out of two hundred and
thirty electors for the department, one hundred and fifty are honest and
upright people..... They adhered to the last Constitution as to their
sole palladium, only a very few of them dreaming of re-establishing
the ancient régime." Their object is plain enough; they are for
the Constitution against the Revolution, for limited power against
discretionary power, for property against robbery, for upright men
against thieves.--"Would you prevent, say the administrative authorities
of Aube,[5148] a return to the disastrous laws of the maximum, of
monopolies, to the resurrection of paper-money?... Would you, as the
price of a blameless life, be once more humiliated, robbed, imprisoned,
tortured by the vilest, most repulsive and most shameless of tyrants?
You have only one recourse: do not fail to go to your primary assemblies
and remain there." The electors, warned by their late personal and
bloody souvenirs, rush to the polls in crowds and vote according to
their consciences, although the government through the oaths it imposes,
its official candidatures, its special commissioners, its intimidation
and its money, bears down with all its weight on the resolutions they
have taken. Although the Jacobins at Nevers, Mâcon and elsewhere, have
forcibly expelled officers legally elected from their bureaux, and
stained the hall with their blood,[5149] "out of 84 departments 66
elected a plurality of electors from among the anti-republicans,
eight being neither good nor bad, while only ten remained loyal to the
Jacobins."[5150]--Appointed by such electors, we can divine what the
new Third will be. "Of the 250 Conventionalists excluded by the
draw scarcely five or six have been re-elected; there are but eight
departments in which the Jacobins have had any success. "-Immediately
after the arrival of the new representatives, the roll of the
Legislative Corps having been checked off, it is found that "the
Government has 70 out of 250 votes among the Ancients, and 200 out of
500 among the Council of the Young," and soon less than 200 in this
Council,[5151] 130 at the most, who will certainly be excluded at the
coming renewal of the chambers in elections which are becoming more and
more anti-Jacobin. One year more, as the rulers themselves admit,
and not one Conventionalist, not one pure Jacobin, will sit in the
Legislative Corps. Consequently, according to the revolutionaries, the
counter-revolution will have taken place in the year VI.
This means that the Revolution is to end in the year VI., and that the
pacific reign of law will be substituted for the brutal reign of force.
In fact, the great majority of the representatives and almost the entire
French nation have no other end in view: they wish to rid themselves of
the social and civil régime to which they have been subject since the
10th of August, 1792, and which, relaxed after Thermidor 9, but renewed
by the 13th of Vendémiaire, has lasted up to the present time, through
the enforcement of its most odious laws and the maintenance of its
most disreputable agents. This is all.--Not twenty avowed or decided
royalists could be found in the two Councils.[5152] There are scarcely
more than five or six--Imbert-Colomès, Pichegru, Willot, Delarne--who
may be in correspondence with Louis XVIII. and disposed to raise
the royal flag. For the other five hundred, the restoration of the
legitimate King, or the establishment of any royalty whatever, is only
in the background; they regard it only at a distance, as a possible
accompaniment and remote consequence of their present undertaking. In
any event, they would accept only "the mitigated monarchy,"[5153] that
which the Liberals of 1788 hoped for, that which Mounier demanded after
the days of October 5 and 6, that advocated by Barnave after the return
from Varennes, that which Malouet, Gouverneur Morris, Mallet-Dupan and
all good observers and wise councillors of France, always recommended.
None of them propose to proclaim divine right and return to aristocratic
feudalism; each proposes to abrogate revolutionary right and destroy
Jacobin feudalism. The principle condemned by them is that which
sustains the theory of anarchy and despotism,
* the application of the Contrat Social,[5154]
* a dictatorship established by coups détat, carried on arbitrarily and
supported by terror,
* the systematic and dogmatic persistence of assaults on persons,
property and consciences,
* the usurpation of a vicious, fanatical minority which has devastated
France for five years and, under the pretext of everywhere setting up
the rights of man, purposely maintaining a war to propagate its system
abroad.
That which they are really averse to is the Directory and its clique,
Barras with his court of gorged contractors and kept women, Reubell
with his family of extortioners, stamp of a parvenu and ways of a tavern
keeper, La Révellière-Lepaux with his hunchback vanity, philosophic
pretensions, sectarian intolerance and silly airs of a pedantic dupe.
What they demand in the tribune,[5155] is the purification of the
administration, the suppression of jobbery, an end to persecution and,
according as they are more or less excited or circumspect, they demand
legal sentences or simply the removal of Jacobins in office, the
immediate and entire suppression or partial and careful reform of
the laws against priests and worship, against émigrés and the
nobles.[5156]--Nobody has any idea of innovation with respect to the
distribution of public powers, or to the way of appointing central or
local authorities. "I swear on my honor," writes Mathieu Dumas, "that
it has always been my intention to maintain the Republican Constitution,
persuaded as I am that, with a temperate and equitable administration,
it might give repose to France, make liberty known and cherished, and
repair in time the evils of the Revolution. I swear that no proposals,
direct or indirect, have ever been made to me to serve, either by my
actions, speech or silence, or cause to prevail in any near or
remote manner, any other interest than that of the Republic and the
Constitution."--"Among the deputies," says Camille Jordan, "several
might prefer royalty; but they did not conspire, regarding the
Constitution as a deposit entrusted to their honor.. They kept their
most cherished plans subordinate to the national will; they comprehended
that royalty could not be re-established without blows and through
the development of this bill."--"Between ourselves," says again
Barbé-Marbois, "there were disagreements as to the way of getting
along with the Directory, but none at all as to the maintenance of
the Constitution."[5157] Almost up to the last moment they confined
themselves strictly to their legal rights, and when, towards the
end, they were disposed to set these aside, it was simply to defend
themselves against the uplifted saber above their heads.[5158] It is
incontestable that their leaders are "the most estimable and the ablest
men in the Republic,"[5159] the only representatives of free suffrage,
mature opinions and long experience, the only ones at least in whose
hands the Republic, restored to order and justice, would have any chance
of becoming viable, in fact, the only liberals. And this is the reason
why the merely nominal Republicans were bound to crush them.
In effect, under a government which disavows attacks on persons and on
public or private property, not only is the Jacobin theory impossible,
but Jacobin wrongs are condemned. Now, the Jacobins, even if they have
abjured their principles, remember their acts. They become alarmed
on the arrival of the first Third, in October, 1795: "The
Conventionalists," writes one of the new deputies,[5160] "look upon us
as men who will one day give them up to justice." After the entry of
the second Third, in May, 1797, their fright increased; the regicides,
especially, feel that "their safety depends only on an exclusive and
absolute dominion."[5161] One day, Treilhard, one of their notables,
alone with Mathieu Dumas, says to this old Feuillant and friend of
Lafayette, of well known loyalty and moderation: "You are very honest
and very able men, and I believe that you really desire to maintain the
government as it is, because neither for you nor for us is there any
sure way of substituting another for it. But we Conventionalists cannot
allow you to go on; whether you mean it or not, you are gradually
leading us to our certain ruin; there is nothing in common between
us."--"What guarantee do you then require?"--"Only one. After that,
we'll do all you want--we'll let you relax the springs--give us this
guarantee and we'll follow you blindly!--"Well, what do you mean by
that?"--
"Enter the tribune and declare that if you had been a member of the
Convention, you would have voted the death of Louis XVI. as we did!"-
"You demand an impossibility. You would not do this in our place. You
sacrifice France to vain terrors."--
"No, the risk is not equal; our heads are at stake!"
Their heads, perhaps,--but certainly their power, places, fortunes,
comforts and pleasures, all that in their eyes makes it worth while
to live.--Every morning, seventy Paris newspapers and as many local
gazettes in the large towns of the provinces expose, with supporting
documents, details and figures, not merely their former crimes, but,
again, their actual corruption, their sudden opulence founded on
prevarication and rapine, their bribes and peculations--
* one, rewarded with a sumptuously furnished mansion by a company of
grateful contractors;
* another, son of a bailiwick attorney and a would-be Carthusian, now
possessor of ecclesiastical property, restored by him at a great
outlay for hunting-grounds; another also monopolizes the finest land in
Seine-et-Oise;
* another, the improvised owner of four chateaux;
* another, who has feathered his nest with fifteen or eighteen
millions,[5162]
With their loose or arbitrary ways of doing things, their habits
as hoarders or spendthrifts, their display and effrontery, their
dissipations, their courtiers and their prostitutes. How can they
renounce all this?--And all the more because this is all they have.
These jaded consciences are wholly indifferent to abstract principles,
to popular sovereignty, to the common weal, to public security; the thin
and brittle coating of sonorous phrases under which they formerly tried
to hide the selfishness and perversity of their lusts, scales off and
falls to the ground. They themselves confess that it is not the Republic
for which they are concerned, but for themselves above everything else,
and for themselves alone. So much the worse for the Republic if its
interest is opposed to their interest; as Siéyès will soon express it,
the object is not to save the Revolution but the revolutionaries.--Thus
disabused, unscrupulous, knowing that they are staking their all, and
resolute, like their colleagues of August 10, September 2 and May31
and like the Committee of Public Safety, they are determined to win, no
matter at what cost or by what means.
For this time again, the Moderates do not want to comprehend that the
war has been declared, and that it is war to the knife. They do not
agree amongst themselves; they want to gain time, they hesitate and take
refuge in constitutional forms--they do not act. The strong measures
which the eighty decided and clear-sighted deputies propose, are
weakened or suspended by the precautions of the three hundred others,
short-sighted, unreliable or timid.[5163] They dare not even avail
themselves of their legal arms:
* annul the military division of the interior,
* suppress Augereau's commission,
* and break the sword presented at their throats by the three conspiring
Directors.
In the Directory, they have only passive or neutral allies, Barthélémy,
who had rather be assassinated than murder, Carnot, the servant of his
legal pass-word, fearing to risk his Republic, and, moreover, calling
to mind that he had voted for the King's death. Among the "Five Hundred"
and the "Ancients," Thibaudeau and Tronçon-Ducoudray, the two leaders
"du ventre," arrest the arms of Pichegru and other energetic men,
prevent them from striking, allow them only to ward off the blow,
and always too late. Three days after the 10th of Fructidor, when, as
everybody knew and saw, the final blow was to be struck, the eighty
deputies, who change their quarters so as not to be seized in their
beds, cannot yet make up their minds to take the offensive. On that
day, an eye-witness[5164] came to Mathieu Dumas and told him that,
the evening before, in Barras' house, they discussed the slaughter or
transportation to Cayenne of about forty members of the two Councils,
and that the second measure was adopted. On which a commandant of the
National Guard, having led Dumas at night into the Tuileries garden,
showed him his men concealed behind the trees, armed and ready to march
at the first signal. He is to possess himself at once of the Luxembourg
(palace)[5165] which is badly guarded, and put an end to Barras and
Reubell on the spot: in war one kills so as not to be killed, and, when
the enemy takes aim, you have the right to fire without waiting. "Only,"
says the commandant, "promise me that you will state in the tribune that
you ordered this attack, and give me your word of honor."[5166] Mathieu
Dumas refuses, simply because he is a man of honor. "You were a fool,"
Napoleon afterwards said to him in this connection, "you know nothing
about revolutions."--In effect, honor, loyalty, horror of blood, respect
for the law, such are the weak points of the party.
The opposite sentiments form the strong points of the other party. On
the side of the triumvirs nobody knows twinges of conscience, neither
Barras, a condottiere open to the highest bidder, and who understands
the value of blows, nor Reubell, a sort of bull, who, becoming excited,
sees red, nor Merlin de Douai, the terrible legist, lay inquisitor and
executioner in private.[5167] As usual with the Jacobins, these men have
unsheathed the sword and brandished it. In contempt of the constitution,
they provoked discussions in the army and let the Legislative Corps
see that, if it did not yield, it would be put out at the point of the
bayonet. They let loose against it, "as in the good old times,"[5168]
their executive riff-raff, and line the avenues and tribunes with "their
bandits of both sexes." They collect together their gangs of roughs,
five or six thousand terrorists from Paris and the departments, and two
thousand officers awaiting orders or on half-pay. In default of Hoche,
whose unconstitutional approach was reported and then prevented, they
have Augereau, arrived expressly from Italy, and who states publicly,
"I am sent for to kill the royalists." It is impossible to find a more
narrow-minded and greater military bully; Reubell, himself, on seeing
him, could not help but exclaim: What a sturdy brigand!"--On the 18th
of Fructidor this official swordsman, with eight or ten thousand troops,
surrounds and invades the Tuileries. The representatives are arrested in
their committee-rooms or domiciles, or pursued, tracked and hunted down,
while the rest of their opponents, notables, officers, heads of bureaux,
journalists, former ministers and directors, Barthélémy and Carnot, are
treated in the same way. Barbé-Marbois, on demanding by virtue of what
law they were arrested,[5169] is told, "by the law of the saber," while
Sotin, Minister of the Police, adds with a smile, "You may be sure that
after what I have taken on myself, it matters little whether one is more
or less compromised."--Thus purged, the two Councils complete themselves
their purgation; they cancel, in forty-nine departments, the election of
their colleagues; through this decree and transportation, through forced
and voluntary resignations, two hundred and fourteen representatives
are withdrawn from the Legislative Corps, while one hundred and eighty
others, through fear or disgust, cease to attend its meetings.[5170]
Nothing remains of the two Councils, except, as in the English
Parliament under Cromwell, a "rump," which rump does business under
drawn swords. In the Council of the Ancients, which, on the 18th of
Fructidor, discussed at midnight[5171] the decree of transportation,
"groups of grenadiers, with a haggard look, in brusque language, with
threatening gestures" and fixed bayonets, surround the amphitheatre,
and, mingled with the soldiers and civil cut-throats, shout out their
orders. Such are the supporters of the slanderous tale cooked up by the
Directory. The voters need such arguments to make themselves believe
in the grand conspiracy which it denounces, to associate Barthélemy,
Carnot, Siméon, Barbé-Marbois, Boissy d'Anglas, Mathieu Dumas, Pastoret,
Tronson du Coudray as accomplices with a knot of subordinate intriguers,
contemptible "monkeys" (marmosets), dolts or spies, whose papers have
been in the hands of the police for six months, and whom it forces to
speak under lock and key.[5172] All are enveloped in the same net, all
are confounded together under the same title, all are condemned en masse
without evidence or formality. "Proofs!" exclaims an orator, "none
are necessary against the royalist faction. I have my own
convictions."[5173]--"Formalities!" exclaims another, "the enemies of
the country cannot invoke formalities which they would have despised had
they triumphed."--"The people are there," says a third, pointing to
a dozen ill-looking men who are present; "the whole people ought to
prevail against a few individuals!"--"Hurry up!" shouts a soldier,
who wants the discussion ended, "patriots, march, double-quick!"--The
debate, nevertheless, drags along, and the Government, growing
impatient, is obliged to intervene with a message: "The people," says
the message, "want to know what has become of the Republic, what
you have done with it..... The conspirators have agents, even among
yourselves." The message is understood, and the representatives now
understand that if they do not transport, they themselves will be
deported. Therefore, "about fourteen or fifteen stand up for the decree,
while seven are against it; the rest remain motionless:" it is thus that
the decree to save the Constitution is freely and legally passed. Four
years before this a similar decree had passed to expel the Girondists,
in just the same manner, with the exception that, at that time, the
Mountain made use of the populace, while now the army is employed;
but save the difference in the figurants, the performance is simply a
repetition of the same drama that was played on the 2nd of June, and is
now again played on the 18th of Fructidor.[5174]
VI. The Directory.
Dictatorship of the Directory.--Its new prerogatives.--Purge
of the Legislative Corps.--Purification of the
administrative and judicial authorities.--Military
commissions in the provinces.--Suppression of newspapers.
--The right of voting reserved to Jacobins alone.--Despotism
of the Directory.--Revival of Terror.--Transportation
substituted for the guillotine.--Treatment of the deported
on the way, in Guyana, and on the islands of Rhé and
Oléron.--Restoration of Jacobin feudalism.
This is the way in which the government of 1793 is brought back to life:
The concentration of all public powers in the hands of an oligarchy, a
dictatorship exercised by about a hundred men grouped around five or six
leaders.
More independent, more despotic and less provisional than any Committee
of Public Safety, the Directory has arrogated to itself the legal right
of placing a commune in a state of siege, of introducing troops within
the constitutional circle[5175] in such a way that it may, at its
discretion, violate Paris and the Legislative Corps. In this body,
mutilated by it and watched by its hireling assassins,[5176] sit
the passive mutes who feel themselves "morally proscribed and
half-deported,"[5177] who abandon debate, and vote with its
stipendiaries and valets.[5178] As a matter of fact, the two councils
have, as formerly the Convention, become chambers "of registry" of
legislative mechanism charged with the duty of countersigning its
orders.--Its sway over the subordinate authorities is still more
absolute. In forty-nine departments, specially designated by decree,
all the administrators of departments, cantons and municipalities,
all mayors, civil and criminal judges, all justices of the peace, all
elected by popular suffrage, are dismissed en masse,[5179] while the
cleaning out in the rest of France is almost as sweeping. We can judge
by one example: in the department of Doubs, which is not put down among
those to be purged, five hundred and thirty administrators or municipal
magistrates are dismissed in 1797, and, in addition, forty-nine others
in 1798. The Directory puts its creatures in their places: suddenly,
the departmental, cantonal, municipal and judicial system, which was
American, becomes Napoleonic so that the local officials, instead
of being delegates of the people, are government delegates.--Note,
especially, the most threatening of all usurpations, the way in which
this government takes justice into its hands and attributes to itself
the right of life and death over persons: not only does it break up
common criminal courts and reorganize them as it pleases, not only does
it renew and select among the purest Jacobins judges of the court of
appeals, but again, in each military division, it institutes a special
and expeditious court without appeal, composed of docile officers,
sub-officers and soldiers, which is to condemn and execute within
twenty-four hours, under pretext of emigration or priesthood, every man
who is obnoxious to the ruling factions.--As to the twenty-five millions
of subjects it has just acquired, there is no refuge: it is forbidden
even to complain. Forty-two opposition or "suspect" journals are
silenced at one stroke, their stock plundered, or their presses broken
up; three months after this, sixteen more take their turn, and, in
a year, eleven others; the proprietors, editors, publishers and
contributors, among whom are La Harpe, Fontanes, Fièvé, Michaud and
Lacretelle, a large body of honorable or prominent writers, the four or
five hundred men who compose the staff of the profession, all condemned
without trial to banishment,[5180] or to imprisonment, are arrested,
take flight, conceal themselves, or keep silent. The only voice now
heard in France is the mega-phone of the government.
Naturally, the faculty of voting is as restricted as the faculty of
writing, so that the victors of Fructidor, together with the right
to speak, now also monopolize the right of electing.--Right away the
government renewed the decree which the expiring Convention had rendered
against allies or relations of émigrés. moreover, it excluded all
relatives or supporters of the members of the primary assemblies, and
forbade the primary assemblies to choose any of these for electors.
Henceforth, all upright or even peaceful citizens consider themselves as
warned and stay at home. Voting is the act of a ruler, and therefore a
privilege of the new sovereigns, which is the view of it entertained
by both sovereigns and subjects:[5181] "a republican minority operating
legally must prevail against a majority influenced by royalism."[5182]
They are to see the government on election days, launching forth "in
each department its commission agents, and controlling votes by threats
and all sorts of promises and seductions,[5183] arresting the electors
and presidents of the primary assemblies," even pouncing on refractory
Jacobins, invalidating the returns of a majority when not satisfactory
to them, and rendering the choice of a minority valid, if it suited
them, in short, constituting itself the chief elector of all local
and central authorities.--Finally, all institutions, laws, public and
private rights, are down, and the nation, body and soul, again becomes,
as under Robespierre, the property of its rulers with this sole
difference, that the kings of Terror, postponing their constitution,
openly proclaim their omnipotence, whilst the others hypocritically rule
under a constitution which they have themselves destroyed, and reign by
virtue of a title which interdicts royalty to them.
They, too, maintain themselves by Terror; only, like so many Tartuffes,
they are not disposed to act openly as executioners. The Directory, heir
to the Convention, affects to repudiate its inheritance: "Woe," says
Boulay de la Meurthe, "to whoever would re-establish scaffolds." There
is to be no guillotine; its purveyors have been too strongly denounced;
they stand too near the red stream and view with too great nervous
horror those who fed it. It is better to employ death at a distance,
lingering and spontaneous, with no effusion of human blood, "dry," less
repulsive than the other sort, but more painful and not less certain;
this shall be imprisonment on the marshes of Rochefort, and, better
still, transportation to the feverish coasts of Guyanna: there is no
distinction between the mode used by the Convention and that of
the Directory, except the distinction between to kill and to cause
death.[5184] Moreover, every brutality that can be employed to repress
the indignation of the proscribed by fear is exhausted on the way.--The
first convoy which bears away, with thirteen others, Barthélémy, who
negotiated the treaty of Basle, Pichegru, the conqueror of Holland,
Lafond-Ladébat, president of the council of the Five Hundred,
Barbé-Marbois, president of the council of the Ancients, was at first
provided with carriages.[5185] An order of the Directory substitutes for
these the prison van, an iron car with one door bolted and padlocked,
and, overhead, openings through which the rain poured in streams, and
with common boards for seats. This lumbering machine without springs
rolls along at a fast trot along the ruts in the road, each jolt sending
the condemned inmates against the hard oak sides and roof; one of these,
on reaching Blois, "shows his black-and-blue elbows." The man selected
to command this escort is the vilest and most brutal reprobate in the
army, Dutertre, a coppersmith foreman before the Revolution, next an
officer and sentenced to be put in irons for stealing in the La Vendée
war, and such a natural robber that he again robs his men of their pay
on the road; he is evidently qualified for his work. On stopping at
Blois, "he passes the night in an orgy with his brothers and friends,"
fellow-thieves and murderers as above described. He curses Madame
Barbé-Marbois who comes to take leave of her husband, dismissing on the
spot the commandant of the gendarmerie who supports her in a swoon, and,
noticing the respect and attentions which all the inhabitants, even the
functionaries, show to the prisoners, he cries out, "Well, what airs and
graces for people that will perhaps be dead in three or four days!" On
the vessel which transports them, and still in sight of Rochelle, a boat
is observed rowing vigorously to overtake them and they hear a shout
of "I am Lafond-Ladébat's son! Allow me to embrace my father!" A
speaking-trumpet from the vessel replies: "Keep away or you'll be fired
on!"--Their cabins, on the voyage, are noxious; they are not allowed to
be on deck more than four at a time, one hour in the morning and an hour
in the evening. The sailors and soldiers are forbidden to speak to them;
their food consists of a sailor's ration, and this is spoilt; toward
the end of the voyage they are starved. In Guyanna they are allowed
one candle to a mess, and no table-linen; they lack water, or it is not
drinkable; out of sixteen taken to Sinnamary only two survive.
Those who are deported the following year, priests, monks, deputies,
journalists and artisans accused of emigration, fare worse. On all
the roads leading to Rochefort, sorrowful crowds are seen on carts or
tramping along in files, on foot, the same as former chains of convicts.
"An old man of eighty-two, Monsieur Dulaurent of Quimper, thus traverses
four departments," in irons which strangle him. Following upon this, the
poor creatures, between the decks of the "Décade" and the "Bayonnaise,"
crammed in, suffocated through lack of air and by the torrid heat, badly
treated and robbed, die of hunger or asphyxia, while Guyanna completes
the work of the voyage: out of 193 conveyed on board the 'Décade," only
39 remain at the end of twenty-two months, and of the 120 brought by the
'Bayonnaise," only one is left.--Meanwhile, in France, in the casemates
of the islands of Rhé and Oléron, over twelve hundred priests become
stifled or rot away, while, on all sides, the military commissioners in
the departments shoot down vigorously. At Paris, and in its environs,
at Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, Rennes, and in most of the large towns,
sudden arrests and clandestine abductions go on multiplying.[5186]
"Nobody, on retiring to rest, is sure of awaking in freedom the next
morning.... From Bayonne to Brussels, there is but one sentiment, that
of unbounded consternation. No one dares either to speak to, encounter,
look at or help one another. Everybody keeps aloof, trembles and hides
away."--So that through this third offensive reaction, the Jacobin
Conquest is completed, and the conquering band, the new feudalism,
becomes a fixed installation. "All who pass here," writes a Tours
habitant, "state that there is no difference in the country between
these times and Robespierre's[5187]..... It is certain that the soil
is not tenable, and that the people are continually threatened with
exactions as in a conquered country.... Proprietors are crushed down
with impositions to such an extent that they cannot meet their daily
expenses, nor pay the cost of cultivation. In some of my old parishes
the imposition takes about thirteen out of twenty sous of an income...
The interest on money amounts to four per cent. a month... Tours, a prey
to the terrorists who devour the department and hold all the offices,
is in the most deplorable state; every family at all well-off, every
merchant, every trader, is leaving it."--The veteran pillagers and
murderers, the squireens, (hobereaux) of the reign of Terror, again
appear and resume their fiefs. At Toulouse, it is Barrau, a shoemaker,
famous up to 1792 for his fury under Robespierre, and Desbarreaux,
another madman of 1793, formerly an actor playing the parts of valet,
compelled in 1795 to demand pardon of the audience on his knees on the
stage, and, not obtaining it, driven out of the house, and now
filling the office of cashier in the theatre and posing as department
administrator. At Blois, we find the ignoble or atrocious characters
with whom we are familiar, the assassins and robbers Hézine, Giot,
Venaille, Bézard, Berger, and Gidouin.[5188] Immediately after
Fructidor, they stirred up their usual supporters against the first
convoy of the deported, "the idlers, the rabble of the harbor, and the
dregs of the people," who overwhelmed them with insults. On this new
demonstration of patriotism the government restores to them their
administrative or judicial "satrapies, and, odious as they are, they are
endured and obeyed, with the mute and mournful obedience of despair."
The soul sinks[5189] on daily perusing the executions of conscripts
and émigrés, and on seeing those condemned to transportation constantly
passing by.... All who displease the government are set down on
these lists of the dead, so-called émigrés, this or that curé who is
notoriously known not to have left the department." It is impossible
for honest people to vote at the primary assemblies; consequently,
"the elections are frightful. The "brothers" and their friends loudly
proclaim that neither nobles, priests, proprietors, merchants, nor
justice are wanted; everything is to be given up to pillage." Let France
perish rather than accept their domination. "The wretches have announced
that they will not give up their places without overthrowing all,
destroying palaces and setting Paris on fire."
VII. Enforcement of Pure Jacobinism.
Application and aggravation of the laws of the reign of
Terror.--Measures taken to impose civic religion.--Arrest,
transportation, and execution of Priests.--Ostracism
proposed against the entire anti-Jacobin class.--The nobles
or the ennobled, not émigrés, are declared foreigners.
--Decrees against émigrés of every class.--Other steps taken
against remaining proprietors.--Bankruptcy, forced loan,
hostages.
It is natural that with pure Jacobins one notes the re-appearance of
the pure Jacobinism, the egalitarian and anti-Christian socialism,
the programme of the funereal year; in short, the rigid, plain,
exterminating ideas which the sect gathers together, like daggers
encrusted with gore, from the cast-off robes of Robespierre,
Billaud-Varennes and Collot d'Herbois.[5190]
In the forefront appears the fixed and favorite idea of the
old-fashioned philosophism. By that I mean the consistent and decreed
plan to found a lay religion, and impose the observances and dogmas
of its theories on twenty-six millions of Frenchmen, and, consequently
extirping Christianity, its worship and its clergy. The inquisitors who
hold office multiply, with extraordinary persistence and minuteness,
proscriptions and vigorous measures for the forcible conversion of
the nation. The aim is to substitute the improvised rites of a logical
abstraction mechanically elaborated in the closet for the tender
emotions nourished by the customs of eighteen centuries.--Never did the
dull imagination of a third-rate scholar and classic poetaster, never
did the grotesque solemnity of a pedant fond of his phrases, never did
the irritating hardness of the narrow and stubborn devotee display with
greater sentimental bombast and more administrative officiousness than
in the decrees of the Legislative Corps,[5191] in the acts passed by
the Directory and in the instructions issued by the ministers Sotin,
Letourneur, Lambrechts, Duval and François de Neufchateau. War on
Sunday, on the old calendar and on fasting, obligatory rest on the
décadi under penalty of fine and imprisonment,[5192] obligatory fêtes on
the anniversaries of January 21 and Fructidor 18, participation of
all functionaries with their cult, obligatory attendance of public and
private instructors with their pupils of both sexes at civic ceremonies,
an obligatory liturgy with catechisms and programmes sent from
Paris, rules for scenic display and for singings, readings, postures,
acclamations and imprecations. One might shrug his shoulders at these
prescriptions of cuistres and these parades of puppets, if, behind the
apostles who compose moral allegories, we did not detect the persecutor
who imprisons, tortures and murders.--By the decree of Fructidor 19, not
only were all the laws of the reign of Terror against unsworn priests,
their harborers and their followers, enforced again, but the Directory
arrogated to itself the right of banishing, "through individual acts
passed for cause," every ecclesiastic "who disturbed the public peace,"
that is to say who exercised his ministry and preached his faith;[5193]
and, moreover, the right of shooting down, within twenty-four hours,
every priest who, banished by the laws of 1792 and 1793, has remained in
or returned to France. Almost all the ecclesiastics, even those who
are sworn, are comprised within the first category; the administration
enumerates 366 in the department of Doubs alone,[5194] and 556 in that
of Hérault. Thousands of ecclesiastics are comprised in the second
category; the administration enumerates over 800 who, returned from the
frontier of Spain alone, still wander about the southern departments.
On the strength of this the moralists in office proclaim a hunt for the
black game in certain places, an universal destruction without exception
or reprieve. For instance, in Belgium, recently incorporated with
France, the whole of the regular and secular clergy is proscribed en
masse and tracked for transportation; 560 ecclesiastics in "Ourthe and
the forests", 539 in Escaut, 883 in Jemmapes, 884 in Sambre-et-Meuse,
925 in la Lys, 957 in Deux-Nèthes, 1,043 in Meuse-Inférieure, 1,469 in
Dyle, in all 7,260, without counting the missing names.[5195] A number
of them escape abroad or hide away; but the rest are caught, and quite
enough of them to load and fill the carts constantly.--"Not a day
passes," says an inhabitant of Blois,[5196] "when from seven to twenty
and more are lodged at the Carmelites." The next day they set out for
the casemates of Rhé and Oléron, or for the Sinnamary marshes, where it
is known what becomes of them: after a few months, three-fourths of them
lie in the cemetery.--In the interior, from time to time, some are
shot as an example--seven at Besançon, one at Lyons, three in the
Bouches-du-Rhône, while the opponents of fanaticism, the official
philanthropists, the enlightened deists of Fructidor, use all these
disguised or declared murders as a basis on which to rear the cult of
Reason.
It remains now to consolidate the worship of Reason with the reign of
Equality, which is the second article in the Jacobin credo. The object
now is to mow down all the heads which rise above the common level,
and, this time, to mow them down, not one by one, but in large groups.
Saint-Just himself had only covertly proposed so extensive and so
sweeping an operation. Siéyès, Merlin de Douai, Reubell, Chazal,
Chénier, and Boulay de la Meurthe, more openly and decidedly insist on
a radical amputation. According to them,[5197] it is necessary "to
regulate this ostracism," by banishing "all those whose prejudices,
pretensions, even existence, in a word, are incompatible with republican
government." That is to say, not alone priests, but likewise nobles
and the ennobled, all parliamentarians, those who are well-off and
distinguished among the bourgeoisie and former notables, about two
hundred thousand property-holders, men and women; in short, all
who still remained among those oppressed and ruined by the
Revolution.[5198]--The proposal was turned down by the ex-noble Barras
and by the public out-cry "of merchants and workmen themselves," and
banishment is replaced by civic degradation. Henceforth,[5199] every
noble or ennobled person, even if he has not left the territory, even if
he has constantly and punctually obeyed revolutionary laws, even if he
be not related to, or allied with, any émigré, finds himself deprived
of his quality as a Frenchman. The fact alone of his being ennobled
or noble before 1789, obliged him to be naturalized according to legal
forms and conditions.--As to the 150,000 gentlemen, artisans and farmers
who have emigrated or who have been accused of emigration, if they
have returned to, or remain in France, they are to leave Paris and all
communes above 20,000 souls within twenty-four hours, and France in
fifteen days. If not, they are to be arrested, brought before the
military commissions and shot on the spot;[51100] in fact, in many
places, at Paris, Besançon and Lyons, they are shot.--Now, a large
number of pretended emigrants, who had never left France,[51101] nor
even their province, nor even their commune, and whose names have been
put on the lists simply to strip them of their property, find that they
are no longer protected either by the constancy or the notoriety of
their residence. The new law is no sooner read than they begin to
imagine the firing squad; the natal soil is too warm for them and they
speedily emigrate.[51102] On the other hand, once the name is down
on the list, rightly or wrongly, it is never removed. The government
purposely refuses to strike it off, while two decrees are applied which
render its removal impossible;[51103] each name maintained on the list
of spoliation and death relieves the Revolution of a probable adversary,
and places one more domain at its disposal.
The Directory renews and aggravates the measures of the Convention
against the remainder of the property-holders: there is no longer a
disguised but a declared bankruptcy. 386,000 fund-holders and pensioners
are deprived of two-thirds of their revenue and of their capital.[51104]
A forced loan of 100 millions is levied progressively, and wholly on
"the well-off class." Finally, there is the law of hostages, this being
atrocious, conceived in the spirit of September, 1792, suggested by the
famous motions of Collot d'Herbois against those in confinement, and
of Billaud-Varennes against the youth, Louis XVII., but extended,
elaborated and drawn up with cool legal acumen, and enforced and applied
with the foresight of an administrator.--Remark that, without counting
the Belgian departments, where an extensive insurrection is under way
and spreading, more than one-half of the territory falls under the
operation of this law. for, out of the eighty-six departments of
France,[51105] properly so called, forty-five are at this moment,
according to the terms of the decree,[51106] "declared to be in a
state of civil uprising." Actually, in these departments, according to
official reports, armed mobs of conscripts are resisting the authorities
charged with recruiting them, bands of two hundred, three hundred and
eight hundred men overrun the country, troops of brigands force open
the prisons, assassinate the gendarmes and set their inmates free; the
tax-collectors are robbed, killed or maimed, municipal officers slain,
proprietors ransomed, estates devastated, and diligences stopped on the
highways." Now, in all these cases, in all the departments, cantons or
communes, three classes of persons, at first the relations and allies
of the émigrés, next the former nobles and ennobled, and finally the
"fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers of persons who, without
being ex-nobles or relations of émigrés," nevertheless form a part of
the bands or mobs, are declared "personally and civilly responsible" for
the violent acts committed. Even when these acts are only "imminent,"
the administration of the department must, in its report, give a list
of all the men and women who are responsible; these are to be taken as
"hostages," and kept in confinement at their own expense in the local
jail. If they escape, they must be put on the same footing as émigrés,
that is to say punished with death. If any damage is sustained, they
are to pay costs; if any murder is committed or abduction effected,
four amongst them must be deported. Observe, moreover, that the local
authorities are obliged, under severe penalties, to execute the law at
once. Note that, at this date, they are ultra Jacobin, since to inscribe
on the list of hostages, not a noble or a bourgeois, but an honest
peasant or respectable artisan, it suffices for these local sovereigns
to designate his son or grandson, who might either be absent, fugitive
or dead, as being "notoriously "insurgent or refractory. The fortunes,
liberties and lives of every individual in easy circumstances are thus
legally surrendered to the despotism, cupidity and hostility of the
levelers in office.--Contemporaries estimate that 200,000 persons were
affected by this law.[51107] The Directory, during the three months of
existence yet remaining to it, enforces it in seventeen departments;
thousands of women and old men are arrested, put in confinement, and
ruined, while several are sent off to Cayenne--and this is called
respect for the rights of man.