The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4

H >> Hippolyte A. Taine >> The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4

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Still lower down than this admirable municipal body, let us try to
imagine, from at least one complete example, the forty-eight
revolutionary committees who supply it with hands. - There is one of
them of which we know all the members, where the governing class,
under full headway, can be studied on the spot and in action.[51] This
consists of the underworld, nomadic class which is revolutionary only
through its appetites; no theory and no convictions animate it; during
the first three years of the Revolution it pays no attention to, or
cares for, public matters; if, since the 10th of August, and
especially since the 2nd of June, it takes any account of these, it is
to get a living and gorge itself with plunder. - Out of eighteen
members, simultaneously or in succession, of the "Bonnet Rouge,"
fourteen, before the 10th of August and especially since the 2nd of
June, are unknown in this quarter, and had taken no part in the
Revolution. The most prominent among these are three painters,
heraldic, carriage and miniature, evidently ruined and idle on account
of the Revolution, a candle-dealer, a vinegar-dealer, a manufacturer
of saltpeter, and a locksmith; while of these seven personages, four
have additionally enhanced the dignity of their calling by vending
tickets for small lotteries, acting as pawnbrokers or as keepers of a
biribi[52] saloon. Seated along with these are two upper-class
domestics, a hack-driver, an ex-gendarme dismissed from the corps, a
cobbler on the street corner, a runner on errands who was once a
carter's boy, and another who, two months before this, was a
scavenger's apprentice, the latter penniless and in tatters before he
became one of the Committee, and since that, well clad, lodged and
furnished. Finally, a former dealer in lottery-tickets, himself a
counterfeiter by his own admission, and a jail-bird. Four others have
been dismissed from their places for dishonesty or swindling, three
are known drunkards, two are not even Frenchmen, while the ring-
leader, the man of brains of this select company is, as usual, a
seedy, used-up lawyer, the ex-notary Pigeot, and expelled from his
professional body on account of bankruptcy. He is probably the author
of the following speculation: After the month of September, 1793, the
Committee, freely arresting whomsoever it pleased in the quarter, and
even outside of it, makes a haul of "three hundred heads of families"
in four months, with whom it fills the old barracks it occupies in the
rue de Sèvres. In this confined and unhealthy tenement, more than one
hundred and twenty prisoners are huddled together, sometimes ten in
one room, two in the same bed, and, for their keeping, they pay three
hundred francs a day. As sixty-two francs of this charge are
verified, there is of this sum, (not counting other extortions or
concessions which are not official), two hundred and thirty-eight
francs profit daily for these 'honest' contractors. Accordingly, they
live freely and have "the most magnificent dinners " in their assembly
chamber; the contribution of ten or twelve francs apiece is " nothing
" for them. - But, in this opulent St. Germain quarter, so many rich
and noble men and women form a herd which must be conveniently
stalled, so as to be the more easily milked. Consequently, toward the
end of March, 1794, the Committee, to increase its business and fill
up the pen, hires a large house on the corner of the boulevard
possessing a court and a garden, where the high society of the quarter
is assigned lodgings of two rooms each, at twelve francs a day, which
gives one hundred and fifty thousand livres per annum, and, as the
rent is twenty-four hundred francs, the Committee gain one hundred and
forty-seven thousand six hundred livres by the operation; we must add
to this twenty sorts of profit in money and other matters - taxes on
the articles consumed and on supplies of every description, charges on
the dispatch and receipt of correspondence and other gratuities, such
as ransoms and fees. A penned-up herd refuses nothing to its
keepers,[53] and this one less than any other; for if this herd is
plundered it is preserved, its keepers finding it too lucrative to
send it to the slaughter-house. During the last six months of Terror,
but two out of the one hundred and sixty boarders of the "Bonnet
Rouge" Committee are withdrawn from the establishment and handed over
to the guillotine. It is only on the 7th and 8th of Thermidor that
the Committee of Public Safety, having undertaken to empty the
prisons, breaks in upon the precious herd and disturbs the well-laid
scheme, so admirably managed. - It was only too well managed, for it
excited jealousy; three months after Thermidor, the " Bonnet Rouge"
committee is denounced and condemned; ten are sentenced to twenty
years in irons, with the pillory in addition, and, among others, the
clever notary,[54] amidst the jeering and insults of the crowd. - And
yet these are not the worst; their cupidity had mollified their
ferocity. Others, less adroit in robbing, show greater cruelty in
murdering. In any event, in the provinces as well as in Paris, in the
revolutionary committees paid three francs a day for each member, the
quality of one or the other of the officials is about the same.
According to the pay-lists which Barère keeps, there are twenty-one
thousand five hundred of these committees in France.[55]

IV. Provincial Administration.

The administrative staff in the provinces. - Jacobinism less in the
departmental towns than in Paris. - Less in the country than in the
towns. - The Revolutionary Committees in the small communes. -
Municipal bodies lukewarm in the villages. - Jacobins too numerous in
bourgs and small towns. - Unreliable or hampered as agents when
belonging to the administrative bodies of large or moderate-sized
towns. - Deficiency of locally recruited staff.

Had the laws of March 21 and September 5, 1793, been strictly
enforced, there would, instead of 21,500 have been 45,000 of these
revolutionary committees. They would have been composed of 540,000
members costing the public 591 millions per year.[56] This would have
made the regular administrative body, already twice as numerous and
twice as costly as under the ancient régime, an extra corps expending,
"simply in surveillance," one hundred millions more than the entire
taxation of the country, the greatness of which had excited the people
against the ancient régime. - Happily, the poisonous and monstrous
fungal growth was only able to achieve half its intended size; neither
the Jacobin seed nor the bad atmosphere it required to make it spread
could be found anywhere. "The people of the provinces," says a
contemporary,[57] "are not up to the level of the Revolution; it
opposes old habits and customs and the resistance of inertia to
innovations which it does not understand." "The plowman is an
estimable man," writes a missionary representative, " but he is
generally a poor patriot."[58] Actually, there is on the one hand,
less of human sediment in the departmental towns than in the great
Parisian sink, and, on the other hand, the rural population, preserved
from intellectual miasmas, better resists social epidemics than the
urban population. Less infested with vicious adventurers, less
fruitful in disordered intellects, the provinces supply a corps of
inquisitors and terrorists with greater difficulty.

And first, in the thousands of communes which have less than five
hundred inhabitants,[59] in many other villages of greater population,
but scattered[60] and purely agricultural, especially in those in
which patois is spoken, there is a scarcity of suitable subjects for a
revolutionary committee. People make use of their hands too much;
horny hands do not write every day; nobody desires to take up a pen,
especially to keep a register that may be preserved and some day or
other prove compromising. It is already a difficult matter to recruit
a municipal council, to find a mayor, the two additional municipal
officers, and the national agent which the law requires; in the small
communes, these are the only agents of the revolutionary government,
and I fancy that, in most cases, their Jacobin fervor is moderate.
Municipal officer, national agent or mayor, the real peasant of that
day belongs to no party, neither royalist nor republican;[61] his
ideas are rare, too transient and too sluggish, to enable him to form
a political opinion. All he comprehends of the Revolution is that
which nettles him, or that which he sees every day around him, with
his own eyes; to him '93 and '94 are and will remain "the time of bad
paper (money) and great fright," and nothing more.[62] Patient in his
habits., he submits to the new as he did to the ancient régime,
bearing the load put on his shoulders, and stooping down for fear of a
heavier one. He is often mayor or national agent in spite of himself;
he has been obliged to take the place and would gladly throw the
burden off. For, as times go, it is onerous; if he executes decrees
and orders, he is certain to make enemies; if he does not execute
them, he is sure to be imprisoned; he had better remain, or go back
home "Gros-Jean," as he was before. But he has no choice; the
appointment being once made and confirmed, he cannot decline, nor
resign, under penalty of being a "suspect;" he must be the hammer in
order not to become the anvil. Whether he is a wine-grower, miller,
ploughman or quarry-man, he acts reluctantly, "submitting a petition
for resignation," as soon as the Terror diminishes, on the ground that
"he writes badly," that "he knows nothing whatever about law and is
unable to enforce it;" that "he has to support himself with his own
hands;" that "he has a family to provide for, and is obliged to drive
his own cart" or vehicle; in short, entreating that he "may be
relieved of his charge."[63] - These involuntary recruits are
evidently nothing more than common laborers; if they drag along the
revolutionary cart they do it like their horses, because they are
pressed into the service.

Above the small communes, in the large villages possessing a
revolutionary committee, and also in certain bourgs, the horses in
harness often pretend to draw and do not, for fear of crushing some
one. - At this epoch, a straggling village, especially when isolated,
in an out-of-the-way place and on no highway, is a small world in
itself, much more secluded than now-a-days, much less accessible to
Parisian verbiage and outside pressure; local opinion here
preponderates; neighbors support each other; they would shrink from
denouncing a worthy man whom they had known for twenty years; the
moral sway of honest folks suffices for keeping down
"blackguards."[64] If the mayor is republican, it is only in words,
perhaps for self-protection, to protect his commune, and because one
must howl along with the other wolves. - - -Moreover, in other
bourgs, and in the small towns, the fanatics and rascals are not
sufficiently numerous to fill all the offices, and, in order to fill
the vacancies, those who are not good Jacobins have been pushed
forward or admitted into the new administrative corps, lukewarm,
indifferent, timid or needy men, who take the place as an asylum or
ask for it as a means of subsistence. " Citizens," one of the
recruits, more or less under restraint, writes later on,[65] " I was
put on the Committee of Surveillance of Aignay by force, and installed
by force." Three or four madmen on it ruled, and if one held any
discussion with them, "it was always threats . . . . Always
trembling, always afraid, - that is the way I passed eight months
doing duty in that miserable place." - Finally, in medium-sized or
large towns, the dead-lock produced by collective dismissals, the
pell-mell of improvised appointments, and the sudden renewal of an
entire set of officials, threw into the administration, willingly or
not, a lot of pretended Jacobins who, at heart, are Girondists or
Feuillantists, but who, having been excessively long-winded, are
assigned offices on account of their stump-speeches, and who
thenceforth sit alongside of the worst Jacobins, in the worst
employment. "Members of the Feurs Revolutionary Committee - those who
make that objection to me," wrote a lawyer in Clermont,[66] "are
persuaded that those only who secluded themselves, felt the Terror.
They are not aware, perhaps, that nobody felt it more than those who
were compelled to execute its decrees. Remember that the handwriting
of Couthon which designated some citizen for an office also conveyed a
threat, and in case of refusal, of being declared 'suspect,' a threat
which promised in perspective the loss of liberty and the
sequestration of property! Was I free, then, to refuse?" - Once
installed, the man must act, and many of those who do act let their
repugnance be seen in spite of themselves: at best, they cannot be got
to do more than mechanical service.

"Before going to court," says a judge at Cambray, "I swallowed a big
glass

of spirits to give me strength enough to preside."

He leaves his house with no other intention than to finish the job,
and, the sentence once pronounced, to return home, shut himself up,
and close his eyes and ears.

"I had to pronounce judgment according to the jury's declaration -
what could I do?"[67]

Nothing, but remain blind and deaf: "I drank. I tried to ignore
everything, even the names of the accused." - It is plain enough that,
in the local official body, there are too many agents who are weak,
not zealous, without any push, unreliable, or even secretly hostile;
these must be replaced by others who are energetic and reliable, and
the latter must be taken wherever they can be found.[68] This
reservoir in each department or district is the Jacobin nursery of the
principal town; from this, they are sent into the bourgs and communes
of the conscription. The central Jacobin nursery for France is in
Paris, from whence they are dispatched to the towns and departments.

V. Jacobins sent to the Provinces.

Importation of a staff of strangers. - Paris Jacobins sent into the
provinces. - Jacobins of enthusiastic towns deported to moderate
ones. - The Jacobins of a district headquarters spread through the
district. - Resistance of public opinion. - Distribution and small
number of really Jacobin agents.

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.[69] 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.[70] - 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;[71] 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.[72] 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.[73] Again, finally, it is the revolutionary
committee of the principal town, which," declared central for the
whole department,"[74] 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;[75] 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,[76] 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,[77] "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."[78]- 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;[79] there, where opinion seems enthusiastic, as at Rochefort
and Grenoble, they report that it is "artificial heat."[80] 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."[81] - At Belfort, where "from one thousand to twelve
hundred fathers of families alone are counted," writes the agent,[82]
"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."[83] At
Toulouse, "out of about fourteen hundred members" who form the club,
only three or four hundred remain after the weeding-out of 1793,[84]
"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:[85] 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.[86] 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. - 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;[87] 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.[88] - At Troyes,[89] 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,[90] 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,[91] 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"[92]
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)[93] . . . . 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."[94] The handwriting, unfortunately, cannot be represented
here, being that of a child five years old.[95]