This system of government is a very simple one and consist in maintaining the subject population in a state of extreme helplessness and of extreme terror. To this end, it is disarmed;[11115] it is kept under surveillance; all action in common is prohibited; its eyes should always be directed to the up-lifted ax and to the prison doors always open; it is ruined and decimated.—For the past six months all these rigors are decreed and applied,—disarmament of "suspects," taxes on the rich, the maximum against traders, requisitions on land-owners, wholesale arrests, rapid executions of sentences, arbitrary penalties of death, and publicized, multiplied tortures. For the past six months, all sorts of executive instruments are set up and put into operation: The Committee of Public Safety, the Committee of General Security, ambulating proconsuls with full power, local committees authorized to tax and imprison at will, a revolutionary army, a revolutionary tribunal. But, for lack of internal harmony and of central impulsion, the machine only half works, the power not being sufficient and its action not sufficiently sweeping and universal.
"You are too remote from the conspiracies against you," says St. Just;[11116] "it is essential that the sword of the law should everywhere be rapidly brandished and your arm be everywhere present to arrest crime.... The ministers confess that, beyond their first and second subordinates, they find nothing but inertia and indifference."—"A similar apathy is found in all the government agents," adds Billaud-Varennes;[11117] "the secondary authorities which are the strong points of the Revolution serve only to impede it." Decrees, transmitted through administrative channels, arrive slowly and are indolently applied. "You are missing that co-active force which is the principle of being, of action, of execution.... Every good government should possess a center of willpower and the levers connected with it.... Every government activity should exclusively originate from the central source."—
"In ordinary governments," says Couthon, finally,[11118] "the right of electing belongs to the people; you cannot take it away from them. In extraordinary governments all impulsion must come from the center; it is from the convention that elections must issue.... You would injure the people by confiding the election of officials to them, because you would expose them to electing men that would betray them."
—The result is that the constitutional maxims of 1789 give way to radically opposed maxims; instead of subjecting the government to the people, the people is made subject to the government. The hierarchy of the ancient régime is re-established under revolutionary terms, and henceforth all powers, much more formidable than those of the ancient régime, cease to be delegated from the depths to the summit and will henceforth instead be delegated from the summit to the bottom.
At the summit, a committee of twelve members, similar to the former royal council, exercises collective royalty; nominally, authority is divided amongst the twelve; it is, in practice, concentrated in a few hands. Several members occupy only a subaltern position, and amongst these, Barère, who, official secretary and mouthpiece, is always ready to make a speech or draft an editorial; others, with special functions, Jean Bon St. André, Lindet, and above all, Prieur de la Côte d'Or and Carnot, confine themselves each to his particular department, navy, war, supplies, with blank signatures, for which they give in return their signatures to the political leaders; the latter, called "the statesmen," Robespierre, Couthon, Saint-Just, Collot d'Herbois, Billaud-Varennes, are the real rulers providing overall direction. It is true that their mandate has to be renewed monthly; but this is a certainty, for, in the present state of the Convention, its vote, required beforehand, becomes an almost vain formality. More submissive than the parliament of Louis XIV., the Convention adopts, without discussion, the decrees which the Committee of Public Safety present to it ready made. It is no more than a registry-office, and scarcely that, for it has relinquished its right of appointing its own committees, that office being assigned to the Committee of Public Safety; it votes as a whole all lists of names which the Committee send in.[11119] Naturally, none but the creatures of the latter and the faithful are inscribed; thus, the whole legislative and parliamentary power belongs to it.—As to executive and administrative power, the ministers have become mere clerks of the Committee of Public Safety; "they come every day at specified hours to receive its orders and acts;[11120] "they submit to it "the list with explanations, of all the agents" sent into the departments and abroad; they refer to it every minute detail; they are its scribes, merely its puppets, so insignificant that they finally lose their title, and for the "Commission on External Relations" a former school-master is taken, an inept clubbist, bar-fly and the pillar of the billiard-room, scarcely able to read the documents brought to him to sign in the café where he passes his days.[11121]—Thus is the second power in the State converted by the Committee into a squad of domestics, while the foremost one is converted into an audience of claqueurs.
To make them do their duty, it has two hands.—One, the right, which seizes people unawares by the collar, is the Committee of General Security, composed of twelve extreme Montagnards, such as Panis, Vadier, Le Bas, Geoffroy, David, Amar, La Vicomterie, Lebon and Ruhl, all nominated, that is to say, appointed by it, being its confederates and subalterns. They are its lieutenants of police, and once a week they come and take part in its labors, as formerly the Sartines, and the Lenoirs assisted the Comptroller-general. A man who this secret committee deems a "suspect," is suddenly seized, no matter who, whether representative, minister, or general, and finds himself the next morning behind the bars in one of the ten new Bastilles.—There, the other hand seizes him by the throat; this is the revolutionary tribunal, an exceptional court like the extraordinary commissions of the ancient régime, only far more terrible. Aided by its police gang, the Committee of Public Safety itself selects the sixteen judges and sixty jurymen[11122] from among the most servile, the most furious, or the most brutal of the fanatics:[11123] Fouquier-Tinville, Hermann, Dumas, Payan, Coffinhal, Fleuriot-Lescot, and, lower down on the scale, apostate priests, renegade nobles, disappointed artists, infatuated studio-apprentices, journeymen scarcely able to write their names, shoemakers, joiners, carpenters, tailors, barbers, former lackeys, an idiot like Ganney, a deaf man like Leroy-Dix-Août; their names and professions indicate all that is necessary to be told: these men are licensed and paid murderers. The Jurymen themselves are allowed eighteen francs a day, so that they may attend to their business more leisurely. This business consists in condemning without proof, without any pleadings, and scarcely any examination, in a hurry, in batches, whoever the Committee of Public Safety might send to them, even the most confirmed Montagnards: Danton, who contrived the tribunal, will soon discover this.—it is through these two government institutions that the Committee of Public Safety keeps every head under the cleaver and each head, to avoid being struck off, bows down,[11124] in the provinces as well as in Paris.
This has happened when the existing local hierarchy was replaced by new authorities making the omnipotent will of the Committee present everywhere. Directly or indirectly, "for all government measures or measures of public safety, all that relates to persons and the general and internal police, all constituted bodies and all public functionaries, are placed under its inspection."[11125] You may imagine how the risk of being guillotined weighed upon them.
To suppress in advance any tendency to administrative inertia, it has had withdrawn from the too powerful, too much respected, department governments, "too inclined to federalism," their departmental dominance and their "political influence."[11126] It reduces these to the levying of taxes and the supervision of roads and canals; it purges them out through its agents; it even purges out the governments of municipalities and districts. To suppress beforehand all probability of popular opposition, it has had the sessions of the sections reduced to two per week; it installs in these sections, for about forty sous a day, a majority of sans-culottes; it orders the suspension "until further directives" of all municipal elections.[11127]
Finally, to have full control on the spot, it appoints its own men, first, the commissioners and the representatives on missions, a sort of temporary corps of directors sent into each department with unlimited powers;[11128] next, a body of national agents, a sort of permanent body of sub-delegates, through whom in each district and municipality it replaces the procureurs-syndics.[11129] To this army of functionaries is added in each town, bourg or large village, a revolutionary committee, paid three francs a day per member, charged with the application of its decrees, and required to make reports thereon. Never before was such a vast and closely woven network cast from above to envelope and keep captive twenty-six million people. Such is the real constitution which the Jacobins substitute for the constitution they have prepared for show. In the arsenal of the monarchy which they destroyed they took the most despotic institutions—centralization, Royal Council, lieutenants of police, special tribunals, intendants and sub-delegates; they disinterred the antique Roman law of lèse-majesty, refurbished old blades which civilization had dulled, aiming them at every throat and now wielded at random against liberties, property and lives. It is called the "revolutionary government;" according to official statements it is to last until peace is secured; in the minds of genuine Jacobins it must continue until all the French have been regenerated in accordance with the formula.