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

All this is true, in the provinces as well as at the capital, for, scarcely is a club organized before it sets to work on the population. In may of the large cities, in Paris, Lyons, Aix and Bordeaux, there are two clubs in partnership,[1223] one, more or less respectable and parliamentary, "composed partly of the members of the different branches of the administration and specially devoted to purposes of general utility," and the other, practical and active, made up of bar-room politicians and club-haranguers, who indoctrinate workmen, market-gardeners and the rest of the lower bourgeois class. The latter is a branch of the former, and, in urgent cases, supplies it with rioters.

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

Thanks to these vulgar auxiliaries, but whose lungs and arms are strong, the party soon becomes dominant; it has force and uses it, and, denying that its adversaries have any rights, it re-establishes all the privileges for its own advantage.[1224]

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III.—How they view the liberty of the press.

Their political doings.

Let us consider its mode of procedure in one instance and upon a limited field, the freedom of the press.[1225] In December, 1790, M. Etienne, an engineer, whom Marat and Fréron had denounced as a spy in their periodicals, brought a suit against them in the police court. The numbers containing the libel were seized, the printers summoned to appear, and M. Etienne claimed a public retraction or 25,000 francs damages with costs. At this the two journalists, considering themselves infallible as well as exempt from arrest, are indignant.

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

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