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[ Buchez et Roux, XIII. 217 (proposal of a woman, member of the club of l'Evêché, Jan. 31, 1792).—Articles in the Gazette Universelle, Feb.11, and in the Patriote Français, Feb. 13.—Moniteur, XI. 576 (session of March 6).—Buchez et Roux, XV. (session of June 10). Petition of 8,000 national guards in Paris: "This faction which stirs up popular vengeance... which seeks to put the caps of labor in conflict with the military casques, the pike with the gun, the rustic's dress with the uniform.">[
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[ Mallet du Pan, "Mémoires," II 429 (note of July, 1792).—Mercure de France, March 10, 1792, article by Mallet du Pan.]
CHAPTER IV. THE DEPARTMENTS.
I.—Provence in 1792.—Early supremacy of the Jacobins in Marseilles.
Composition of the party.—The club and the municipality.
—Expulsion of the "Earnest" regiment.
Should you like to see the revolutionary tree when, for the first time, it came fully into leaf, it is in the department of the Bouches-du-Rhône you have to look. Nowhere else had it been so precocious, nowhere were local circumstances and native temperament so well adapted to enhance its growth.—"A blistering sky, an excessive climate, an arid soil, rocks,... savage rivers, torrential or dry or overburdened," blinding dust, nerves upset by steady northern blasts or by the intermittent gusts of the sirocco. A sensual race choleric and impetuous, with no intellectual or moral ballast, in which the mixture of Celt and Latin has destroyed the humane suavity of the Celt and the serious earnestness of the Roman; "complete, tough, powerful, and restless men,"[2401] and yet gay, spontaneous, eloquent, dupes of their own bombast, suddenly carried away by a flow of words and superficial enthusiasm. Their principal city numbering 120,000 souls, in which commercial and maritime risks foster innovating and adventurous spirits; in which the sight of suddenly-acquired fortunes expended on sensual enjoyments constantly undermines all stability of Character; in which politics, like speculation, is a lottery offering its prizes to audacity; besides all this, a free port and a rendezvous for lawless nomads, disreputable people, without steady trade,[2402] scoundrels, and blackguards, who, like uprooted, decaying seaweed, drift from coast to coast around the entire circle of the Mediterranean sea; a veritable sink filled with the dregs of twenty corrupt and semi-barbarous civilizations, where the scum of crime cast forth from the prisons of Genoa, Piedmont, Sicily, indeed, of all Italy, of Spain, of the Archipelago, and of Barbary,3 accumulates and ferments.2 No wonder that, in such a time the reign of the mob should be established there sooner than elsewhere.[2403]—After many an explosion, this reign is inaugurated August 17, 1790, by the removal of M. Lieutaud, a sort of bourgeois, moderate Lafayette, who commands the National Guard. Around him rally a majority of the population, all men "honest or not, who have anything to lose."[2404] After he is driven out, then proscribed, then imprisoned, they resign themselves, and Marseilles belongs to the low class, to 40,000 destitute and rogues led by the club.