0] "that
numerous class free of any anxiety, is separating itself from the
people; it considers itself above them,... they are the sole object
of its distrust. It is everywhere haunted by the one idea that the
revolution is a war between those who have and those who have not."--It
abstains, indeed, from the elections, it keeps away from patriotic
clubs, it demands the restoration of order and the reign of law; it
rallies to itself "the multitude of conservative, timid people, for whom
tranquility is the prime necessity," and especially, which is still more
serious, it charges the disturbances upon their veritable authors. With
suppressed indignation and a mass of undisputed evidence, Andre Chenier,
a man of feeling, starts up in the midst of the silent crowd and openly
tears off the mask from the Jacobins.[2371] He brings into full light
the daily sophism by which a mob, "some hundreds of idlers gathered in
a garden or at a theater, are impudently called the people." He portrays
those "three or four thousand usurpers of national sovereignty whom
their orators and writers daily intoxicate with grosser incense than any
adulation offered to the worst of despots;" those assemblies where "an
infinitely small number of French appears large, because they are united
and yell;" that Paris club from which honest, industrious, intelligent
people had withdrawn one by one to give place to intriguers in debt, to
persons of tarnished reputations, to the hypocrites of patriotism, to
the lovers of uproar, to abortive talents, to corrupted intellects,
to outcasts of every kind and degree who, unable to manage their own
business, indemnify themselves by managing that of the public. He shows
how, around the central factory and its twelve hundred branches of
insurrection, the twelve hundred affiliated clubs, which, "holding each
other's hands, form a sort of electric chain around all France" and
giving it a shock at every touch from the center; their confederation,
installed and enthroned, is not only as a State within the State,
but rather as a sovereign State in a vassal State; summoning their
administrative bodies to their bar, judicial verdicts set aside through
their intervention, private individuals searched, assessed and condemned
through their verdicts. All this constitutes a steady, systematic
defense of insubordination and revolt; as, "under the name of hoarding
and monopoly, commerce and industry are described as misdemeanors;"
pr