Elections of year V.—Character and sentiments of the
elected.—The new majority in the Corps Legislatif.—Its
principles and program.—Danger and anxiety of the Jacobin
minority.—Indecision, division, scruples and weakness of
the moderate party.—Decision, want of scruples, force and
modes of procedure of the Jacobin faction.—The 18th of
Fructidor.
"It was a long time," writes a small trader of Evreux, "since so many people were seen at the elections.[5146].... The eight electors for the town obtained at the first ballot the absolute majority of suffrages.... Everybody went to the polls so as to prevent the nomination of any elector among the terrorists, who had declared that their reign was going to return."—In the environs of Blois, a rural proprietor, the most circumspect and most peaceable of men, notes in his journal[5147] that "now is the time to take a personal interest.. .. Every sound-thinking man has promised not to refuse any office tendered to him so as to keep out the Jacobins..... It is reasonably hoped that the largest number of the electors will not be terrorists and that the majority of the Legislative Corps being all right, the minority of the furious, who have only one more year of office, will give way (in 1798) to men of probity not steeped in crime.. .. In the country, the Jacobins have tried in vain: people of means who employed a portion of the voters, obtained their suffrages, every proprietor wishing to have order.... The Moderates have agreed to vote for no matter what candidate, provided he is not a Jacobin.... Out of two hundred and thirty electors for the department, one hundred and fifty are honest and upright people..... They adhered to the last Constitution as to their sole palladium, only a very few of them dreaming of re-establishing the ancient régime." Their object is plain enough; they are for the Constitution against the Revolution, for limited power against discretionary power, for property against robbery, for upright men against thieves.—"Would you prevent, say the administrative authorities of Aube,[5148] a return to the disastrous laws of the maximum, of monopolies, to the resurrection of paper-money?... Would you, as the price of a blameless life, be once more humiliated, robbed, imprisoned, tortured by the vilest, most repulsive and most shameless of tyrants? You have only one recourse: do not fail to go to your primary assemblies and remain there." The electors, warned by their late personal and bloody souvenirs, rush to the polls in crowds and vote according to their consciences, although the government through the oaths it imposes, its official candidatures, its special commissioners, its intimidation and its money, bears down with all its weight on the resolutions they have taken. Although the Jacobins at Nevers, Mâcon and elsewhere, have forcibly expelled officers legally elected from their bureaux, and stained the hall with their blood,[5149] "out of 84 departments 66 elected a plurality of electors from among the anti-republicans, eight being neither good nor bad, while only ten remained loyal to the Jacobins."[5150]—Appointed by such electors, we can divine what the new Third will be. "Of the 250 Conventionalists excluded by the draw scarcely five or six have been re-elected; there are but eight departments in which the Jacobins have had any success. "-Immediately after the arrival of the new representatives, the roll of the Legislative Corps having been checked off, it is found that "the Government has 70 out of 250 votes among the Ancients, and 200 out of 500 among the Council of the Young," and soon less than 200 in this Council,[5151] 130 at the most, who will certainly be excluded at the coming renewal of the chambers in elections which are becoming more and more anti-Jacobin. One year more, as the rulers themselves admit, and not one Conventionalist, not one pure Jacobin, will sit in the Legislative Corps. Consequently, according to the revolutionaries, the counter-revolution will have taken place in the year VI.
This means that the Revolution is to end in the year VI., and that the pacific reign of law will be substituted for the brutal reign of force. In fact, the great majority of the representatives and almost the entire French nation have no other end in view: they wish to rid themselves of the social and civil régime to which they have been subject since the 10th of August, 1792, and which, relaxed after Thermidor 9, but renewed by the 13th of Vendémiaire, has lasted up to the present time, through the enforcement of its most odious laws and the maintenance of its most disreputable agents. This is all.—Not twenty avowed or decided royalists could be found in the two Councils.[5152] There are scarcely more than five or six—Imbert-Colomès, Pichegru, Willot, Delarne—who may be in correspondence with Louis XVIII. and disposed to raise the royal flag. For the other five hundred, the restoration of the legitimate King, or the establishment of any royalty whatever, is only in the background; they regard it only at a distance, as a possible accompaniment and remote consequence of their present undertaking. In any event, they would accept only "the mitigated monarchy,"[5153] that which the Liberals of 1788 hoped for, that which Mounier demanded after the days of October 5 and 6, that advocated by Barnave after the return from Varennes, that which Malouet, Gouverneur Morris, Mallet-Dupan and all good observers and wise councillors of France, always recommended. None of them propose to proclaim divine right and return to aristocratic feudalism; each proposes to abrogate revolutionary right and destroy Jacobin feudalism. The principle condemned by them is that which sustains the theory of anarchy and despotism,
* the application of the Contrat Social,[5154]
* a dictatorship established by coups détat, carried on arbitrarily and supported by terror,
* the systematic and dogmatic persistence of assaults on persons, property and consciences,
* the usurpation of a vicious, fanatical minority which has devastated France for five years and, under the pretext of everywhere setting up the rights of man, purposely maintaining a war to propagate its system abroad.
That which they are really averse to is the Directory and its clique, Barras with his court of gorged contractors and kept women, Reubell with his family of extortioners, stamp of a parvenu and ways of a tavern keeper, La Révellière-Lepaux with his hunchback vanity, philosophic pretensions, sectarian intolerance and silly airs of a pedantic dupe. What they demand in the tribune,[5155] is the purification of the administration, the suppression of jobbery, an end to persecution and, according as they are more or less excited or circumspect, they demand legal sentences or simply the removal of Jacobins in office, the immediate and entire suppression or partial and careful reform of the laws against priests and worship, against émigrés and the nobles.[5156]—Nobody has any idea of innovation with respect to the distribution of public powers, or to the way of appointing central or local authorities. "I swear on my honor," writes Mathieu Dumas, "that it has always been my intention to maintain the Republican Constitution, persuaded as I am that, with a temperate and equitable administration, it might give repose to France, make liberty known and cherished, and repair in time the evils of the Revolution. I swear that no proposals, direct or indirect, have ever been made to me to serve, either by my actions, speech or silence, or cause to prevail in any near or remote manner, any other interest than that of the Republic and the Constitution."—"Among the deputies," says Camille Jordan, "several might prefer royalty; but they did not conspire, regarding the Constitution as a deposit entrusted to their honor.. They kept their most cherished plans subordinate to the national will; they comprehended that royalty could not be re-established without blows and through the development of this bill."—"Between ourselves," says again Barbé-Marbois, "there were disagreements as to the way of getting along with the Directory, but none at all as to the maintenance of the Constitution."[5157] Almost up to the last moment they confined themselves strictly to their legal rights, and when, towards the end, they were disposed to set these aside, it was simply to defend themselves against the uplifted saber above their heads.[5158] It is incontestable that their leaders are "the most estimable and the ablest men in the Republic,"[5159] the only representatives of free suffrage, mature opinions and long experience, the only ones at least in whose hands the Republic, restored to order and justice, would have any chance of becoming viable, in fact, the only liberals. And this is the reason why the merely nominal Republicans were bound to crush them.
In effect, under a government which disavows attacks on persons and on public or private property, not only is the Jacobin theory impossible, but Jacobin wrongs are condemned. Now, the Jacobins, even if they have abjured their principles, remember their acts. They become alarmed on the arrival of the first Third, in October, 1795: "The Conventionalists," writes one of the new deputies,[5160] "look upon us as men who will one day give them up to justice." After the entry of the second Third, in May, 1797, their fright increased; the regicides, especially, feel that "their safety depends only on an exclusive and absolute dominion."[5161] One day, Treilhard, one of their notables, alone with Mathieu Dumas, says to this old Feuillant and friend of Lafayette, of well known loyalty and moderation: "You are very honest and very able men, and I believe that you really desire to maintain the government as it is, because neither for you nor for us is there any sure way of substituting another for it. But we Conventionalists cannot allow you to go on; whether you mean it or not, you are gradually leading us to our certain ruin; there is nothing in common between us."—"What guarantee do you then require?"—"Only one. After that, we'll do all you want—we'll let you relax the springs—give us this guarantee and we'll follow you blindly!—"Well, what do you mean by that?"—
"Enter the tribune and declare that if you had been a member of the Convention, you would have voted the death of Louis XVI. as we did!"- "You demand an impossibility. You would not do this in our place. You sacrifice France to vain terrors."—