Consequently, swarms of Jacobin locusts spread from Paris out over the provinces, and from the local country-towns over the surrounding country.—In this cloud of destructive insects, there are various figures of different sizes: in the front rank, are the representatives on mission, who are to take command in the departments; in the second rank, "the political agents," who, assigned the duty of watching the neighboring frontier, take upon themselves the additional duty of leading the popular club of the town they reside in, or of urging on its administrative body.[3369] Besides that, there issue from the Paris headquarters in the rue St. Honoré, select sans-culottes who, authorized or delegated by the Committee of Public Safety, proceed to Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Tonnerre, Rochefort and elsewhere, to act as missionaries among the too inert population, or form the committees of action and the tribunals of extermination that are recruited with difficulty on the spot.[3370]—Sometimes also, when a town has a bad record, the popular club of a sounder-minded city sends its delegates there, to bring it into line; thus, four deputies of the Metz club arrive without notice in Belfort, catechize their brethren, associate with them on the local Revolutionary Committee, and, suddenly, without consulting the municipality, or any other legal authority, draw up a list of "moderates, fanatics and egoists," on whom they impose an extraordinary tax of one hundred and thirty-six thousand six hundred and seventeen livres;[3371] in like manner, sixty delegates from the club of Côte-d'Or, Haute-Marne, Vosges, Moselle, Saone-et-Loire and Mont-Terrible, all "tempered by the white heat of Pére Duchesne," proceed to Strasbourg at the summons of the representatives, where, under the title of "propagandists," they are to regenerate the town.—At the same time, in each department, the Jacobins of the principal town are found scattered along the high ways, that they may inspect their domain and govern their subjects. Sometimes, it is the representative on mission, who, personally, along with twenty "hairy devils," makes his round and shows off his traveling dictatorship; again, it is his secretary or delegate who, in his place and in his name, comes to a second-class town and draws up his documents.[3372] At another time, it is "a committee of investigation and propaganda" which, "chosen by the club and provided with full powers," comes, in the name of the representatives, to work up for a month all the communes of the district.[3373] Again, finally, it is the revolutionary committee of the principal town, which," declared central for the whole department,"[3374] delegates one or the other of its members to go outside the walls, and purge and recompose suspected municipalities.—Thus does Jacobinism descend and spread itself, story after story, from the Parisian center to the smallest and remotest commune: throughout provincial France, whether colorless or of uncertain color, the imposed or imported administration imposes its red stigma.
But the stamp is only superficial; for the sans-culottes, naturally, are not disposed to confer offices on any but men of their sort, while in the provinces, especially in the rural districts, such men are rare. As one of the representatives says: there is a "dearth of subjects."—At Mâcon, Javogues tries in vain;[3375] he finds in the club only "disguised federalists;" the people, he says, "will not open their eyes it seems to me that this blindness is due to the physique of the country, which is very rich." Naturally, he storms and dismisses; but, even in the revolutionary committee, none but dubious candidates are presented to him for selection; he does not know how to manage in order to renew the local authorities. "They play into each others' hands," and he ends by threatening to transfer the public institutions of the town elsewhere, if they persist in proposing to him none but bad patriots.—At Strasbourg,[3376] Couturier, and Dentzel, on mission, report that: "owing to an unexampled coalition among all the capable citizens, obstinately refusing to take the office of mayor, in order, by this course, to clog the wheels, and subject the representatives to repeated and indecent refusals," he is compelled to appoint a young man, not of legal age, and a stranger in the department.—At Marseilles, write the agents,[3377] "in spite of every effort and our ardent desire to republicanize the Marseilles people, our pains and fatigues are nearly all fruitless.... Public spirit among owners of property, mechanics and journey-men is everywhere detestable.... The number of discontented seems to increase from day to day. All the communes in Var, and most of those in this department are against us.... they constitute a race to be destroyed, a country to be colonized anew....
"I repeat it, the only way to work out the Revolution in the federalized departments, and especially in this one, is to deport all the indigenous population who are able to bear arms, scatter them through the armies and put garrisons in their places, which, again, will have to be changed from time to time."—At the other extremity of the territory, in Alsace, "republican sentiments are still in the cradle; fanaticism is extreme and incredible; the spirit of the inhabitants in general is in no respect revolutionary... Nothing but the revolutionary army and the venerated guillotine will cure them of their conceited aristocracy. The execution of the laws depends on striking off the heads of the guilty, for nearly all the rural municipalities are composed only of the rich, of clerks of former bailiffs, almost always devoted to the ancient régime."[3378]—And in the rest of France, the population, less refractory, is not more Jacobin; here where the people appear "humble and submissive" as in Lyons and Bordeaux, the inspectors report that it is wholly owing to terror;[3379] there, where opinion seems enthusiastic, as at Rochefort and Grenoble, they report that it is "artificial heat."[3380] At Rochefort, zeal is maintained only "by the presence of five or six Parisian Jacobins." At Grenoble, Chépy, the political agent and president of the club, writes that "he is knocked up, worn out, and exhausted, in trying to keep up public spirit and maintain it on a level with events," but he is "conscious that, if he should leave, all would crumble."—There are none other than Moderates at Brest, at Lille, at Dunkirk; if this or that department, the Nord, for instance, hastened to accept the "Montagnard" constitution, it is only a pretense: "an infinitely small portion of the population answered for the rest."[3381]—At Belfort, where "from one thousand to twelve hundred fathers of families alone are counted," writes the agent,[3382] "one popular club of thirty or forty members, at the most, maintains and enforces the love of liberty."—In Arras, "out of three or four hundred members composing the popular club" the weeding-out of 1793 has spared but "sixty-three, one tenth of whom are absent."[3383] At Toulouse, "out of about fourteen hundred members" who form the club, only three or four hundred remain after the weeding-out of 1793,[3384] "mere machines, for the most part," and "whom ten or a dozen intriguers lead as they please."—The same state of things exists elsewhere, a dozen or two determined Jacobins-twenty-two at Troyes, twenty-one at Grenoble, ten at Bordeaux, seven at Poitiers, as many at Dijon-constitute the active staff of a large town:[3385] the whole number might sit around one table.—The Jacobins, straining as they do to swell their numbers, only scatter their band; careful as they are in making their selections, they only limit their number. They remain what they always have been, a small feudality of brigands superposed on conquered France.[3386] If the terror they spread around multiplies their serfs, the horror they inspire diminishes their proselytes, while their minority remains insignificant because, for their collaborators, they can have only those just like themselves.
VI. Quality of staff thus formed.
Quality of staff thus formed.—Social state of the agents.
—Their unfitness and bad conduct.—The administrators in
Seine-et-Marne.—Drunkenness and feasting.—Committees and
Municipalities in the Côte-d'Or.—Waste and extortions.
—Traffickers in favors at Bordeaux.—Seal breakers at Lyons.
—Monopolizers of national possessions.—Sales of personal
property.—Embezzlements and Frauds.-A procès-verbal in the
office of the mayor of Strasbourg.—Sales of real-estate.
—Commissioners on declarations at Toulouse.—The
administrative staff and clubs of buyers in Provence.—The
Revolutionary Committee of Nantes.
But when we regard the final and last set of officials of the revolutionary government closely, in the provinces as well as at Paris, we find among them we hardly anyone who is noteworthy except in vice, dishonesty and misconduct, or, at the very least, in stupidity and grossness.—First, as is indicated by their name, they all must be, and nearly all are, sans-culottes, that is to say, men who live from day to day on their daily earnings, possessing no income from capital, confined to subordinate places, to petty trading, to manual services, lodged or encamped on the lowest steps of the social ladder, and therefore requiring pay to enable them to attend to public business;[3387] it is on this account that decrees and orders allow them wages of three, five, six, ten, and even eighteen francs a day.—At Grenoble, the representatives form the municipal body and the revolutionary committee, along with two health-officers, three glovers, two farmers, one tobacco-merchant, one perfumer, one grocer, one belt-maker, one innkeeper, one joiner, one shoemaker, one mason, while the official order by which they are installed, appoints "Teyssière, licoriste," national agent.[3388]—At Troyes,[3389] among the men in authority we find a confectioner, a weaver, a journeyman-weaver, a hatter, a hosier, a grocer, a carpenter, a dancing-master, and a policeman, while the mayor, Gachez, formerly a private soldier in the regiment of Vexin, was, when appointed, a school-teacher in the vicinity.—At Toulouse,[3390] a man named Terrain, a pâté dealer, is installed as president of the administration; the revolutionary committee is presided over by Pio, a journeyman-barber; the inspiration, "the soul of the club," is a concierge, that of the prison.—The last and most significant trait is found at Rochefort,[3391] where the president of the popular club is the executioner.—If such persons form the select body of officials in the large towns, what must they be in the small ones, in the bourgs and in the villages?" Everywhere they are of the meanest"[3392] cartmen, sabot—(wooden shoe) makers, thatchers, stone-cutters, dealers in rabbit-skins, day laborers, unemployed craftsmen, many without any pursuit, or mere vagabonds who had already participated in riots or jacqueries, bar flies, having given up work and designated for a public career only by their irregular habits and incompetence to follow a private career.—Even in the large towns, it is evident that discretionary power has fallen into the hands of nearly raw barbarians; one has only to note in the old documents, at the Archives, the orthography and style of the committees empowered to grant or refuse civic cards, and draw up reports on the opinions and pursuits of prisoners. "His opinions appear insipid (Ces opignons paroisse insipide)[3393].... He is married with no children." (Il est marie cent (sans) enfants).... Her profession is wife of Paillot-Montabert, she is living on her income, his relations are with a woman we pay no attention to; we presume her opinions are like her husband's."[3394] The handwriting, unfortunately, cannot be represented here, being that of a child five years old.[3395]
"As stupid as they are immoral,"[3396] says Representative Albert, of the Jacobins he finds in office at Troyes. Low, indeed, as their condition may be, their feeling and intelligence are yet lower because, in their professions or occupations, they are the refuse instead of the élite, and, especially on this account, they are turned out after Thermidor, some, it is true, as Terrorists, but the larger number as either dolts, scandalous or crazy, simply intruders, or mere valets.—At Rheims, the president of the district is[3397] "a former bailiff, on familiar terms with the spies of the Robespierre régime, acting in concert with them, but without being their accomplice, possessing none of the requisite qualities for administration." Another administrator is likewise "a former bailiff, without means, negligent in the highest degree and a confirmed drunkard." Alongside of these sit "a horse-dealer, without any means, more fit for shady dealings than governing, moreover a drunkard, a dyer, lacking judgment, open to all sorts of influences, pushed ahead by the Jacobin faction, and having used power in the most arbitrary manner, rather, perhaps, through ignorance than through cruelty, a shoemaker, entirely uninstructed, knowing only how to sign his name," and others of the same character. In the Tribunal, a judge is noted as
"true in principle, but whom poverty and want of resources have driven to every excess, a turncoat according to circumstances in order to get a place, associated with the leaders in order to keep the place, and yet not without sensibility, having, perhaps, acted criminally merely to keep himself and his family alive."
In the municipal body, the majority is composed of an incompetent lot, some of them being journeymen-spinners or thread twisters, and others second-hand dealers or shopkeepers, "incapable," "without means," with a few crack-brains among them: one, "his brain being crazed, absolutely of no account, anarchist and Jacobin;" another, "very dangerous through lack of judgment, a Jacobin, over-excited;" a third, "an instrument of tyranny, a man of blood capable of every vice, having assumed the name of Mutius Scoevola, of recognized depravity and unable to write."—Similarly, in the Aube districts, we find some of the heads feverish with the prevailing epidemic, for instance, at Nogent, the national agent, Delaporte, "who has the words 'guillotine' and 'revolutionary tribunal' always on his lips, and who declares that if he were the government he would imprison doctor, surgeon and lawyer, who delights in finding people guilty and says that he is never content except when he gets three pounds' weight of denunciations a day." But, apart from these madcaps, most of the administrators or judges are either people wholly unworthy of their offices, because they are "inept," "too uneducated," "good for nothing," "too little familiar with administrative forms," "too little accustomed to judicial action," "without information," "too busy with their own affairs," "unable to read or write," or, because "they have no delicacy," are "violent," "agitators," "knaves," "without public esteem," and more or less dishonest and despised.[3398]—As an example a fellow from Paris, who was at first at Troyes, a baker's apprentice,[3399] and afterwards a dancing-master; then he appeared at the Club, making headway, doubtless, through his Parisian chatter, until he stood first and soon became a member of the district. Appointed an officer in the sixth battalion of Aube, he behaved in such a manner in Vendée that, on his return, "his brethren in arms" broke up the banner presented to him, "declaring him unworthy of such an honor, because he cowardly fled before the enemy." Nevertheless, after a short plunge, he came back to the surface and, thanks to his civil compeers, was reinstated in his administrative functions; during the Terror, he was intimate with all the Terrorists, being one of the important men of Troyes.—The mayor of the town, Gachez, an old soldier and ex-schoolmaster, is of the same stuff as this baker's apprentice. He, likewise, was a Vendéan hero; only, he was unable to distinguish himself as much as he liked, for, after enlisting, he failed to march; having pocketed the bounty of three hundred livres, he discovered that he had infirmities and, getting himself invalidated, he served the nation in a civil capacity. "His own partisans admit that he is a drunkard and that he has committed forgery." Some months after Thermidor he is sentenced to eight years imprisonment and put in the pillory for this crime. Hence, "almost the entire commune is against him; the women in the streets jeer him, and the eight sections meet together to request his withdrawal." But Representative Bô reports that he is every way entitled to remain, being a true Jacobin, an admirable terrorist and "the only sans-culotte mayor which the commune of Troyes has to be proud of."[33100]