The parliamentary landscape has fallen away; things have returned to a state of nature, that is, to a state of war, and one is no longer concerned with debate but with brute force. To be in the right, to convince the convention, to obtain majorities, to pass decrees, would be appropriate in ordinary times, under a government provided with an armed force and a regular administration, by which, from the summits of public authority, the decrees of a majority descend through submissive functionaries to a sympathetic and obedient population. But, in times of anarchy, and above all, in the den of the Commune, in Paris, such as the 10th of August and the 2nd of September made it, all this is of no account.
V.—The Jacobins forming alone the Sovereign People.
Opinion in Paris.—The majority of the population
constitutional.—The new régime unpopular.—Scarcity and
high cost of food.—Catholic customs obstructed.—Universal
and increasing discontent.—Aversion or indifference to the
Girondins.—Political resignation of the majority.—Modern
customs incompatible with pure democracy.—Men of property
and income, manufacturers and tradesmen, keep aloof.
—Dissension, timidity, and feebleness of the Conservatives.
—The Jacobins alone form the sovereign people.
And it is of no account because, first of all, in this great city of Paris the Girondists are isolated, and have no group of zealous partisans to depend upon. For, if the large majority is opposed to their adversaries, that is not in their favor, it having secretly, at heart, remained "Constitutionalists."[3353] "I would make myself master of Paris," says a professional observer, "in ten days without striking a blow if I had but six thousand men, and one of Lafayette's stable-boys to command them." Lafayette, indeed, since the departure or concealment of the royalists, represents the old, fixed, and innermost opinion of the capital. Paris submits to the Girondists as well as to the Montagnards as usurpers; the mass of the public regards them with ill-will, and not only the bourgeoisie, but likewise the majority of the people loathe the established government.
Work is scarce and food is dear; brandy has tripled in price; only four hundred oxen are brought in at the Poissy market instead of seven or eight thousand; the butchers declare that there will be no meat in Paris next week except for the sick.[3354] To obtain a small ration of bread it is necessary to wait five or six hours in a line at the baker's shops, and,[3355] as is customary, workmen and housekeepers impute all this to the government. This government, which so poorly provides for its needs, offends them yet more in their deepest feelings, in the habits most dear to them, in their faith and worship. The common people, even at Paris, is still at this time very religious, much more so than at the present day. When the priest bearing the Host passes along the street, the crowd "gathers from all sides, men, women, and children, young and old, and fall on their knees in worship."[3356] The day on which the relics of saint Leu are borne in procession through the Rue St. Martin, "everybody kneels; I did not see a man," says a careful observer, "that did not take off his hat. At the guard-house of the Mauconseil section, the entire company presented arms." At the same time the "citoyennes around the markets talked with each other to know if there was any way of decking houses with tapestry."[3357] The following week they compel the revolutionary committee of Saint-Eustache[3358] to authorize another procession, and again each one kneels: "everybody approved of the ceremony, no one, that I heard of; making any objection. This is a striking picture.... I saw repentance, I saw the parallel each is forced to draw between the actual state of things and the former one. I saw what a privation the people had to endure in the loss of that which, formerly, was the most imposing of all church ceremonies. People of all ranks and ages were deeply affected and humble, and many had tears in their eyes." Now, in this respect, the Girondists, by virtue of being philosophers, are more iconoclastic, more intolerant than any one, and there is no reason for preferring them to their adversaries. At bottom, the government installed by the recent electoral comedy, for the major portion of the Parisians, has no authority but the fact of its existence; people put up with it because there is no other, fully recognizing its worthlessness;[3359] it is a government of strangers, of interlopers, of bunglers, of cantankerous, weak and violent persons. The Convention has no hold either on the people or on the bourgeois class, and in proportion as it glides more rapidly down the revolutionary hill, it breaks one by one the ties with which it is still connected to the undecided.
In a reign of eight months the Convention has alienated public opinion entirely. "Almost all who have property of any kind are conservative,"[3360] and all the conservatives are against it. "The gendarmes here openly speak up against the Revolution, even up to the revolutionary tribunal, whose judgments they loudly condemn. All the old soldiers detest the actual order of things."[3361]—The volunteers "who come back from the army appear angry at putting the King to death, and on that account they would flay all the Jacobins."[3362]—No party in the Convention escapes this universal disaffection and growing aversion. "If the question of guillotining the members of the Convention could be put to an open vote, it would be carried against them by a majority of nineteen-twentieths,"[3363] which, in fact, is about the proportion of electors who, through fright or disgust, keep away from the polls. Let the "Right" or the "Left" of the Convention be victors or vanquished, that is a matter which concerns them; the public at large does not enter into the discussions of its conquerors, and no longer cares for either Gironde or "Mountain." Its old grievances always revive "against the Vergniauds, Guadets" and company;[3364] it does not like them, and has no confidence in them, and will let them be crushed without helping them. The infuriates may expel the Thirty-Two, if they choose, and put them under lock and key. "There is nothing the aristocracy (meaning by this, owners of property, merchants, bankers, the rich, and the well-to-do), desire so much as to see them guillotined."[3365] 'Even the inferior aristocracy (meaning petty tradesmen and head-workmen) take no more interest in their fate than if they were so many escaped wild beasts... again caught and put in their cages."[3366] "Guadet, Pétion, Brissot, would not find thirty persons in Paris who would take their part, or even take the first step to save them."[3367]
Apart from all this, it makes little difference whether the majority has any preferences; its sympathies, if it has any, will never be other than platonic. It no longer counts for anything in either camp, it has withdrawn from the battle-field, it is now simply the stakes of the conflict, the prey and the booty of the winner. For, unable or unwilling to comply with the political system imposed on it, it is self-condemned to utter powerlessness. This system is the direct government of the people by the people, with all that ensues, permanence of the section assemblies, club debates in public, uproar in the galleries, motions in the open air, mobs and manifestations in the streets; nothing is less attractive and more impracticable to civilized and busy people. In our modern communities, work, the family, and social intercourse absorb nearly all our time; hence, such a system suits only the idle and rough outcasts who feel at home there; the others refuse to enter an environment expressly set up for singles, orphans, unskilled persons, living in lodgings, foul-mouthed, lacking the sense of smell, with a gift of the gab, robust arms, tough hide, solid haunches, expert in hustling, and with whom blows replace arguments.[3368]—After the September massacres, and on the opening of the barriers, a number of proprietors and persons living on their incomes, not alone the suspected but those who thought they might become so, escaped from Paris, and, during the following months, the emigration increases along with the danger. Towards December rumor has it that lists have been made up of former Feuillants; "we are assured that during the past eight days more than fourteen thousand persons have left the capital."[3369] According to the report of the Minister himself;[3370] "many who are independent in fortune and position abandon a city where the renewal of proscription is talked of daily."—" Grass grows in the finest streets," writes a deputy, "while the silence of the grave reigns in the Thébaïdes (isolated villas) of the faubourg Saint-Germain."—As to the conservatives who remain, they confine themselves to private life, from which it follows that, in the political balance, those present are of no more account than the absentees. At the municipal elections in October, November, and December, out of 160,000 registered voters, there are at first 144,000, then 150,000, and finally 153,000 who stay away from the polls; these, certainly, and for a much better reason, do not show themselves at the assemblies of their sections. Commonly, out of three or four thousand citizens, only fifty or sixty attend; one of these, called a general assembly, which signifies the will of the people to the Convention, is composed of twenty-five voters.[3371] Accordingly, what would a sensible man, a friend of order, do in these dens of fanatics? He stays at home, as on stormy days; he lets the shower of words spend itself, not caring to be spattered in the gutter of nonsense which carries off the filth of this district.
If he leaves his house at all he goes out for a walk, the same as in old times, to indulge the tastes he had under the old régime, those of a talkative, curious on-looker and friendly stroller, of a Parisian safe in his well run town. "Yesterday evening," writes a man who feels the coming Reign of Terror, "I took my stand in the middle of the right alley of the Champs-Elysées;[3372] it was thronged with—who do you think? Would you believe it, with moderates, aristocrats, owners of property, and very pretty women, elegantly dressed, seeking the caresses of the balmy spring breeze! It was a charming sight. All were gay and smiling. I was the only one that was not so... I withdrew hastily, and, on passing through the Tuileries garden, I saw a repetition of what I had seen before, forty thousand wealthy people scattered here and there, almost as many as Paris contains."—These are evidently the sheep ready for the slaughter-house. They no longer think of defense, they have abandoned their posts to the sans-culottes, "they refuse all civil and military functions,"[3373] they avoid doing duty in the National Guard and instead pay their substitutes. In short, they withdraw from a game which, in 1789, they desired to play without understanding it, and in which, since the end of 1791, they have always burnt their fingers. The cards may be handed over to others, especially as the cards are dirty and the players fling them in each others' faces; as for themselves they are spectators, they have no other ambitions.—"Leave them their old enjoyments,[3374] leave them the pleasure of going and coming throughout the kingdom; but do not force them to take part in the war. Subject them to the heaviest taxation and they will not complain; nobody will even know that they exist, while the most serious question that disturbs them in their thoughtful days is, can one amuse one's self as much under a republican form of government as under the ancient régime?" They hope, perhaps, to escape under cover of inoffensive neutrality. Is it likely that the victor, whoever he is, will regard people as enemies who are resigned to his rule before-hand? "A dandy[3375] alongside of me remarked, yesterday morning, 'They will not take my arms away, for I never had any.' Alas,' I replied to him, 'don't make a boast of it, for you may find forty thousand simpletons in Paris that would say the same thing, and, indeed, it is not at all to the credit of Paris.'"—Such is the blindness or self-complacency of the city dweller who, having always lived under a good police, is unwilling to change his habits, and is not aware that the time has come for him to turn fighting man in his turn.
The manufacturers, the merchants and the man living on his income are even less disposed than the independent gentleman, to give up his private affairs for public affairs. His business will not wait for him, he being confined to his office, store or counting-room. For example, "the wine-dealers[3376] are nearly all aristocrats in the sense of this word at this period," but "never were their sales so great as during the insurrections of the people and in revolutionary days." Hence the impossibility of obtaining their services in those days. "They are seen on their premises very active, with three or four of their assistants," and turn a deaf ear to every appeal. "How can we leave when custom is so good? People must have their wants supplied. Who will attend to them if I and the waiters should go away?"—There are other causes of their weakness. All grades in the National Guard and all places in the municipality having been given up to the Jacobin extremists, they have no chiefs: the Girondists are incapable of rallying them, while Garat, the Minister, is unwilling to employ them. Moreover, they are divided amongst themselves, no one having any confidence in the other, "it being necessary to chain them together to have anything accomplished."[3377] Besides this, the remembrance of September weighs upon their spirits like a nightmare.—All this converts people into a timid flock, ready to scamper at the slightest alarm. "In the Contrat Social section," says an officer of the National Guard, "one-third of those who are able to defend the section are off in the country; another third are hiding away in their houses, and the other third dare not do anything."[3378] "If, out of fifty thousand moderates, you can collect together three thousand, I shall be very much astonished. And if; out of these three thousand, five hundred only are found to agree, and have courage enough to express their opinion, I shall be still more astonished. The latter, for instance, must expect to be Septemberized!"[3379] This they know, and hence they keep silent and bend beneath the yoke. "What, indeed, would the majority of the sections do when it is demonstrated that a dozen raving maniacs at the head of a sans-culottes section puts the other forty-seven sections of Paris to flight?"—Through this desertion of the state and themselves, they surrender in advance, and, in this great city, as formerly in ancient Athens and Rome, we see alongside of an immense population of subjects without any rights, a small despotic oligarchy in itself composing the sovereign people.[3380]