The manufacturers, the merchants and the man living on his income are even less disposed than the independent gentleman, to give up his private affairs for public affairs. His business will not wait for him, he being confined to his office, store or counting-room. For example, "the wine-dealers[76] are nearly all aristocrats in the sense of this word at this period," but "never were their sales so great as during the insurrections of the people and in revolutionary days."Hence the impossibility of obtaining their services in those days.
"They are seen on their premises very active, with three or four of their assistants," and turn a deaf ear to every appeal. "How can we leave when custom is so good? People must have their wants supplied.
Who will attend to them if I and the waiters should go away? " --There are other causes of their weakness. All grades in the National Guard and all places in the municipality having been given up to the Jacobin extremists, they have no chiefs: the Girondists are incapable of rallying them, while Garat, the Minister, is unwilling to employ them. Moreover, they are divided amongst themselves, no one having any confidence in the other, "it being necessary to chain them together to have anything accomplished."[77] Besides this, the remembrance of September weighs upon their spirits like a nightmare. -- All this converts people into a timid flock, ready to scamper at the slightest alarm. "In the Contrat Social section," says an officer of the National Guard, "one-third of those who are able to defend the section are off in the country; another third are hiding away in their houses, and the other third dare not do anything."[78] "If, out of fifty thousand moderates, you can collect together three thousand, I shall be very much astonished. And if; out of these three thousand, five hundred only are found to agree, and have courage enough to express their opinion, I shall be still more astonished. The latter, for instance, must expect to be Septemberized!"[79] This they know, and hence they keep silent and bend beneath the yoke. "What, indeed, would the majority of the sections do when it is demonstrated that a dozen raving maniacs at the head of a sans-culottes section puts the other forty-seven sections of Paris to flight? " -- Through this desertion of the state and themselves, they surrender in advance, and, in this great city, as formerly in ancient Athens and Rome, we see alongside of an immense population of subjects without any rights, a small despotic oligarchy in itself composing the sovereign people.[80]
VI.
Composition of the party. -- Its numbers and quality decline. -- The Underlings. -- Idle and dissipated workmen. -- The suburban rabble. --Bandits and blackguards. -- Prostitutes. -- The September actors.
Not that this minority has been on the increase since the 10th of August, quite the reverse. -- On the 19th of November, 1792, its candidate for the office of Mayor of Paris, Lhuillier, obtains only 4,896 votes.[81] On the 18th of June, 1793, its candidate for the command of the National Guard, Henriot, will secure but 4,573 votes;to ensure his election it will be necessary to cancel the election twice, impose the open vote, and relieve voters from showing their section tickets, which will permit the trusty to vote successively in other quarters and apparently double their number by allowing each to vote two or three times.[82] Putting all together, there are not six thousand Jacobins in Paris, all of them sans-culottes and partisans of the "Mountain."[83] Ordinarily, in a section assembly, they number "ten or fifteen," at most "thirty or forty," "organized into a permanent tyrannical board." . . . "The rest listen and raise their hands mechanically." . . . "Three or four hundred Visionaries, whose devotion is as frank as it is stupid, and two or three hundred more to whom the result of the last revolution did not bring the places and honors they too evidently relied on," form the entire staff of the party; "these are the clamorers of the sections and of the groups, the only ones who have clearly declared themselves against order, the apostles of a new sedition, scathed or ruined men who need disturbance to keep alive," while under these comes the train of Marat, vile women, worthless wretches, and "paid shouters at three francs a day."[84]
