in its journal, together with their denunciations; it insists on their demands; henceforth every Jacobin in the remotest borough feels the support and endorsement, not only of his local club, but again of the great club whose numerous offshoots overspread the territory, and thus extend its all-powerful protection to the least of its adherents. In return for this protection, each associated club obeys the word of command given at Paris, and to and fro, from the centre to the extremities, a constant correspondence maintains the established harmony. A vast political machine is thus set a-going, a machine with thousands of arms, all working at once under one impulsion, and the lever which gives the motion is in the hands of a few master spirits in the Rue St. Honoré.1

At first sight the success of the Jacobins seems doubtful, for they are in a minority, and a very small one. At Besançon, in November, 1791, the revolutionists of every shade of opinion and degree, whether Girondists or Montagnards, consist of about 500 or 600 out of 3000 electors, and in November, 1792, of not more than the same number out of 6000 and 7000. At Paris, in November, 1791, there are 6700 out of more than 81,000 on the rolls; in October, 1792, there are less than 14,000 out of 160,000. At Troyes, in 1792, there are found only 400 or 500 out of 7000 electors, and at Strasburg the same number out of 8000 electors. Accordingly, only about one-tenth of the electoral population are revolutionists, and if we leave out the Girondists and the semi-conservatives the number is reduced by one-half. Taking the whole of France all the Jacobins put together do not amount to 300,000. This is a small number for the enslavement of 6,000,000 of able-bodied men, and for installing in a country of 26,000,000 inhabitants a more absolute despotism than that of any Asiatic sovereign. Force, however, is not measured by numbers; they form a band in the midst of a crowd, and in this disorganized crowd a band that is determined to push its way like an iron wedge splitting a log. And M. Taine adds:

The only defence a nation has against inward usurpation, as well as invasion from without, is its government. Government is the indispensable instrument of common action. Let it fail or falter and the great majority, otherwise employed, undecided what to do and lukewarm, disintegrates and falls to pieces. Resolution, audacity, rude energy, are all that are needed to make the lever act, and none of these are wanting in the Jacobin.2

The elections to the only Legislative Assembly that met under the constitution of 1791 revealed a widespread indifference to politics

among the active citizens. Most of them abstained from voting altogether. The explanation of this seems to be that the middle and lower middle classes had now secured the things they chiefly wanted from government. Feudalism and privileges had been swept away. Tolerable judicial and administrative systems had been established. The power of the Church was broken and the church lands had passed into the hands of active citizens. The small landed proprietors and the commercial classes alike, relieved from their old burdens, were now eagerly bent on availing themselves of the new conditions, and on making money as fast as possible. Most of them were too busy or too careless to exercise their political rights. Those who did vote, voted mostly for men as devoid of political principles as themselves, men whose political creed might almost be summed up as a twofold dread of Ancien Régime and new democracy. A triumph of the old nobility might mean a resumption of church lands or a restoration of privileges. A triumph of the mob leaders would endanger property and profits. Either would be unfavorable to middle class enrichment, and so the middle classes returned a majority favorably disposed to the existing state of things, to the Revolution so far as it had gone, so far but no further.

In a sense there was a conservative majority. But the old conservative party, which included, perhaps, a third of the old constituent, was unrepresented in the new legislature. Emigration and abstentions, rather than numerical weakness, prevented the aristocratic and ultra-clerical party from securing any representatives in the Assembly. That party was still strong in the country. It possessed much wealth and much influence, and an assembly in which it was not represented could not really represent France. But its members stood outside the legislature, forming plots, intriguing with foreign powers, and occupying places in the king's ministry. They were thus a source of national weakness and disunion, and far more harmful than they would have been if they had been fairly represented in the legislature.1

It is evident that such a body as the new legislature would fall an easy prey to the men of extremes. The leaders of the Jacobins, indeed, Sièyés, Robespierre, and others, were also excluded from the Assembly. The leadership of the Left within its ranks fell to the men known as the Girondists, from the fact that several of them represented the Gironde department. These were enthusiastic but somewhat visionary democrats, of whom the types are Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné. Already they would gladly have substituted a republic for the monarchy. They did not scruple to encourage mob demonstrations and even rioting for the purpose of influencing and intimidating the government; and they thus helped to raise a power which they could

1 Symes, op. cit., pp. 59, 60.

not control. They were mostly young and inexperienced men, eloquent, and to some extent dupes of their own eloquence. Their fine phrases were largely borrowed from ancient writers, who ranted about liberty in the days of the Roman despotism. They recognized the need of raising the national character in order to fit France for democratic institutions; and they came to think that they could best do this by involving the country in a war with the tyrants of Europe, a war which they fondly hoped would draw out heroic qualities, such as the ancient Greek republics displayed in their contest with the Persian despotism. But little practical sagacity could be hoped from the dreamers who deliberately adopted such a programme as this.1

A third element in the struggle as to who should seize the executive power, which was falling from the hands of the king, was found in the Paris Commune, ready to join the Jacobins in the duel with the Girondists to the death, though quite ready to turn their arms afterwards against them. Before the Revolution Paris was divided into twenty-one quarters. Louis XVI. in his regulation of April 13, 1789, for the convocation of the States-General, divided it into sixty districts. Next the law of 27th June, 1790, created a new division into forty-eight sections, which continued till 1860. These sections elected the members of the municipality. Nominally only the active citizens (aged twenty-five years and paying taxes equal to three days' work) took part in the section meetings, but all citizens and even women came as spectators, and the active citizens fell off till only fifteen or twenty thousand attended out of the eighty-two thousand, and gradually even less. At first the sections could only meet upon special convocation by the municipal body and were required to disperse as soon as the elections were over, but gradually their meetings became more frequent, and in July, 1792, a decree of the Assembly sanctioned the permanence which already existed in fact.2

1 Ibid., p. 61.

La Rousse, Encyclopédie, articles "Commune" and "Sections de Paris."

On the 26th of July, 1792, came the manifesto of the Duke of Brunswick, preparatory to the invasion of France. It threatened any city which resisted with the fullest rigors of war, and declared that Paris should be totally destroyed if any harm happened to the king or queen. This exactly suited the purposes of the Jacobin minority, who were organizing a "directory of insurrection." The Girondist leaders of the Assembly, with the weakness which attempts to avert the wrath of a mob by partially granting its demands, had given leave to the section meetings to sit en permanence, and the twenty-eight most violent of these chose commissioners, who assembled at the Hôtel de Ville and displaced by force the regular municipality, which had been elected the year before and was not sufficiently revolutionary. The next step was to demoralize the National Guard by decreeing that all citizens, passive as well as active, should be enrolled in its ranks, and furnished with pikes till better arms could be provided.

Thus was prepared the attack on the Tuileries of the 10th of August. The king and his family took refuge with the Assembly, where only 284 of the 749 deputies ventured to attend, and a deputation of the commissioners from the Hôtel de Ville, backed by the mob, compelled the Assembly to suspend the king from the so-called executive power, and to issue orders for the election of a National Convention to determine what was to be done next. And thus the old monarchy of the Bourbons in France came to an end.

It has been much disputed whether the massacres in the prisons on September 2 and 3 were a part of the organized scheme. The probability seems to be that all the authorities were paralyzed by fear and suspicion. The Assembly, the ministers, the National Guards and the municipality alike allowed the dreadful deeds to be done by a mere handful of men. At the outside there were not

200 murderers, the official list says 173, and yet not a single battalion of the National Guard, not a single group of men collected by chance and seeing the terrible scene, interfered to prevent its completion. As Mr. Symes says:

If we attribute these massacres to a sudden outburst of mob fury, fear, and suspicion, we may fairly regard them simply as an illustration of the condition to which the common people of Paris had been reduced under the old régime. Their characters had been formed, not in the few Revolutionary months, but during the long years and successive generations that preceded the outburst. And we may say that even these and the later atrocities prove how much the Revolution was needed in order to destroy a social system which brutalized the masses to such an extent.1

It is not necessary to go into the history of the Convention, with the execution of the king and queen; the fierce struggle for power between the Girondists and the Jacobins over the inert and floating mass of the Marsh or Plain; the final defeat and destruction of the former and the supremacy of the more energetic and determined faction; the terrible Committee of Public Safety, the Representatives on Mission, the Revolutionary Tribunal, and the Reign of Terror. Amid the tremendous conflict of internal forces, acting under the pressure from without, it was a perfectly natural evolution of executive power by the means and methods which had been preparing in the previous centuries, and especially in the one just drawing to a close. The greater the ideality and force of imagination combined with strength of character in a people, the fiercer the struggle was certain to be. Its character can hardly be shown more clearly than in the three men whose names have perhaps acquired the greatest prominence,— Marat, Danton, and Robespierre. All were educated men and all inspired by principle much more than personal selfseeking. Marat, the most repulsive of the three, was a physician of considerable practice. He was also a stu

1 Op. cit., p. 79.