Disposition of the workers.—Effect of poverty and want of
work.—Effect of Jacobin preaching.—The revolutionary
army.—Quality of its recruits—Its first review.—Its
actual effective force.
Paris always has its interloping, floating population. A hundred thousand of the needy, one-third of these from the departments, "beggars by race," those whom Rétif de la Bretonne had already seen pass his door, Rue de Bièvre, on the 13th of July, 1789, on their way to join their fellows on the suburb of St. Antoine,[2518] along with them "those frightful raftsmen," pilots and dock-hands, born and brought up in the forests of the Nièvre and the Yonne, veritable savages accustomed to wielding the pick and the ax, behaving like cannibals when the opportunity offers,[2519] and who will be found foremost in the ranks when the September days come. Alongside these stride their female companions "barge-women who, embittered by toil, live for the moment only," and who, three months earlier, pillaged the grocer-shops.[2520] All this "is a frightful crowd which, every time it stirs, seems to declare that the last day of the rich and well-to-do has come; tomorrow it is our turn, to-morrow we shall sleep on eiderdown."—Still more alarming is the attitude of the steady workmen, especially in the suburbs. And first of all, if bread is not as expensive as on the 5th of October, the misery is worse. The production of articles of luxury has been at a standstill for three years, and the unemployed artisan has consumed his small savings. Since the ruin of St. Domingo and the pillaging of grocers' shops colonial products are dear; the carpenter, the mason, the locksmith, the market-porter, no longer has his early cup of coffee,[2521] while they grumble every morning at the thought of their patriotism being rewarded by an increase of deprivation.
But more than all this they are now Jacobins, and after nearly three years of preaching, the dogma of popular sovereignty has taken deep root in their empty brains. "In these groups," writes a police commissioner, "the Constitution is held to be useless and the people alone are the law. The citizens of Paris on the public square think themselves the people, populus, what we call the universality of citizens."[2522]—It is of no use to tell them that, alongside of Paris, there is a France. Danton has shown them that the capital "is composed of citizens belonging one way or another to the eighty-three departments; that is has a better chance than any other place to appreciate ministerial conduct; that it is the first sentinel of the nation," which makes them confident of being right.[2523]—It is of no use to tell them that there are better-informed and more competent authorities than themselves. Robespierre assures them that "in the matter of genius and public-spiritedness the people are infallible, whilst every one else is subject to mistakes,"[2524] and here they are sure of their capacity.—In their own eyes they are the legitimate, competent authorities for all France, and, during three years, the sole theme their courtiers of the press, tribune, and club, vie with each other in repeating to them, is the expression of the Duc de Villeroy to Louis XIV. when a child: "Look my master, behold this great kingdom! It is all for you, it belongs to you, you are its master!"—Undoubtedly, to swallow and digest such gross irony people must be half-fools or half-brutes; but it is exactly their capacity for self-deception which makes them different from the sensible or passive crowd and casts them into a band whose ascendancy is irresistible. Convinced that a street mob is entitled to absolute rule and that the nation expresses its sovereignty through its gatherings, they alone assemble the street mobs, they alone, by virtue of their conceit and lack of judgment, believe themselves kings.
Such is the new power which, in the early months of the year 1792, starts up alongside of the legal powers. It is not foreseen by the Constitution; nevertheless it exists and declares itself; it is visible and its recruits can be counted.[2525] On the 29th of April, with the Assembly consenting, and contrary to the law, three battalions from the suburb of St. Antoine, about 1500 men,[2526] march in three columns into the hall, one of which is composed of fusiliers and the other two of pikemen, "their pikes being from eight to ten feet long," of formidable aspect and of all sorts, "pikes with laurel leaves, pikes with clover leaves, pikes à carlet, pikes with turn-spits, pikes with hearts, pikes with serpents tongues, pikes with forks, pikes with daggers, pikes with three prongs, pikes with battle-axes, pikes with claws, pikes with sickles, lance-pikes covered with iron prongs." On the other side of the Seine three battalions from the suburb of St. Marcel are composed and armed in the same fashion. This constitutes a kernel of 3,000 more in other quarters of Paris. Add to these in each of the sixty battalions of the National guard the gunners, almost all of them blacksmiths, locksmiths and horse-shoers, also the majority of the gendarmes, old soldiers discharged for insubordination and naturally inclined to rioting, in all an army of about 9,000 men, not counting the usual accompaniment of vagabonds and mere bandits; ignorant and eager, but men who do their work, well armed, formed into companies, ready to march and ready to strike. Alongside of the talking authorities we have the veritable force that acts, for it is the only one which does act. As formerly the praetorian guard of the Caesars in Rome, or the Turkish guards of the Caliphs of Baghdad, it is henceforth master of the capital, and through the capital, of the Nation.
III.—Its leaders.—Their committee.—Methods for arousing the crowd.
As the troops are so are their leaders. Bulls must have drovers to conduct them, one degree superior to the brute but only one degree, dressed, talking and acting in accordance with his occupation, without dislikes or scruples, naturally or willfully hardened, fertile in jockeying and in the expedients of the slaughterhouse, themselves belonging to the people or pretending to belong to them. Santerre is a brewer of the Faubourg St. Antoine, commander of the battalion of" Enfants Trouvés," tall, stout and ostentatious, with stentorian lungs, shaking the hand of everybody he meets in the street, and when at home treating everybody to a drink paid for by the Duke of Orleans. Legendre is a choleric butcher, who even in the Convention maintains his butchering traits. There are three or four foreign adventurers, experienced in all kinds of deadly operations, using the saber or the bayonet without warning people to get out of the way. Rotonde, the first one, is an Italian, a teacher of English and professional rioter, who, convicted of murder and robbery, is to end his days in Piedmont on the gallows. The second, Lazowski, is a Pole, a former dandy, a conceited fop, who, with Slave facility, becomes the barest of naked sans-culottes; former enjoying a sinecure, then suddenly turned out in the street, and shouting in the clubs against his protectors who he sees put down; he is elected captain of the gunners of the battalion St. Marcel, and is to be one of the September slaughterers. His drawing-room temperament, however, is not rigorous enough for the part he plays in the streets, and at the end of a year he is to die, consumed by a fever and by brandy. The third is another chief slaughterer at the September massacres. Fournier, known as the American, a former planter, who has brought with him from St. Domingo a contempt for human life; "with his livid and sinister countenance, his mustache, his triple belt of pistols, his coarse language, his oaths, he looks like a pirate." By their side we encounter a little hump-backed lawyer named Cuirette-Verrières, an unceasing speaker, who, on the 6th of October, 1789, paraded the city on a large white horse and afterwards pleaded for Marat, which two qualifications with his Punch figure, fully establish him in the popular imagination; the rugged guys, moreover, who hold nocturnal meetings at Santerre's needed a writer and he probably met their requirements.—This secret society can count on other faithfuls. "Brière, wine-dealer, Nicolas, a sapper in the 'Enfants Trouvés' battalion, Gonor, claiming to be one of the victors of the Bastille,"[2527] Rossignol, an old soldier and afterwards a journeyman-jeweler, who, after presiding at the massacres of La Force, is to become an improvised general and display his incapacity, debauchery, and thievery throughout La Vendée. "There are yet more of them," Huguenin undoubtedly, a ruined ex-lawyer, afterwards carabineer, then a deserter, next a barrier-clerk, now serving as spokesman for the Faubourg St. Honoré and finally president of the September commune; there was also, doubtless, St. Huruge alias Père Adam, the great barker of the Palais-Royal, a marquis fallen into the gutter, drinking with and dressing like a common porter, always flourishing an enormous club and followed by the riffraff.[2528]—These are all the leaders. The Jacobins of the municipality and of the Assembly confine their support of the enterprise to conniving at it and to giving it their encouragement.[2529] It is better for the insurrection to seem spontaneous. Through caution or shyness the Girondins, Pétion, Manual and Danton himself, keep in the background——there is not reason for their coming forward.—The rest, affiliated with the people and lost in the crowd, are better qualified to fabricate the story which their flock will like. This tale, adapted to the crowd's intellectual limits, form and activity, is both simple and somber, such as children like, or rather a melodrama taken from an alien stage in which the good appear on one side, and the wicked on the other with an ogre or tyrant in the center, some infamous traitor who is sure to be unmasked at the end of the piece and punished according to his deserts, the whole grandiloquent terms and, as a finale, winding up with a grand chorus. In the raw brain of an over-excited workman politics find their way only in the shape of rough-hewn, highly-colored imagery, such as is furnished by the Marseillaise, the Carmagnole, and the Ça ira. The requisite motto is adapted to his use; through this misshapen magnifying glass the most gracious figure appears under a diabolical aspect. Louis XVI. is represented here "as a monster using his power and treasure to oppose the regeneration of the French. A new Charles IX., he desires to bring on France death and desolation. Be gone, cruel man, your crimes must end! Damiens was less guilty than thou art! He was punished with the most horrible torture for having tried to rid France of a monster, while you, attempting twenty-five million times more, are allowed full immunity![2530] Let us trample under our feet this simulacra of royalty! Tremble tyrants, Scoevolas are still amongst you!"
All this is pronounced, declaimed or rather shouted, publicly, in full daylight, under the King's windows, by stump-speakers mounted on chairs, while similar provocations daily flow from the committee installed in Santerre's establishment, now in the shape of displays posted in the faubourgs, now in that of petitions circulated in the clubs and sections, now through motions which are gotten up "among the groups in the Tuileries, in the Palais-Royal, in the Place de Grève and especially on the Place de la Bastille." After the 2nd of June the leaders founded a new club in the church of the "Enfants Trouvés" that they might have their special laboratory and thus do their work on the spot.[2531] Like Plato's demagogues, they understand their business. They have discovered the cries which make the popular animal take note, what offense offends him, what charm attracts him, and on what road he should be made to follow. Once drawn in and under way, he will march blindly on, borne along by his own involuntary inspiration and crushing with his mass all that he encounters on his path.