and warns the proprietress that he will kill her if she makes
a complaint against him, and, as she probably does complain of him, he
obliges her, in the name of the Executive Power, to pay him fifty crowns
damages.--As to the common Jacobin gangsters, their reward, besides food
and drink, is perfect licentiousness. In all houses invaded at eleven
o'clock in the evening. Whilst the father flies, or the husband screams
under the cudgel, one of the villains stations himself at the entrance
with a drawn saber in his hands, and the wife or daughter remains at
the mercy of the others; they seize her by the neck and maintain their
hold.[3220] In vain does she scream for help. "Nobody in Saint-Afrique
dares go outdoors at night"; nobody comes, and, the following day, the
juge-de-paix dares not receive the complaint, because "he is afraid
himself."--Accordingly, on the 23rd of September, the municipal officers
and the town-clerk, who made their rounds, were nearly beaten to death
with clubs and stones; on the 10th of October another municipal officer
was left for dead; a fortnight before this, a lieutenant of volunteers,
M. Mazieres, "trying to do his duty, was assassinated in his bed by his
own men." Naturally, nobody dares whisper a word, and, after two months
of this order of things, it may be presumed that at the municipal
elections of the 21st of October, the electors will be docile. In any
event, as a precaution, their notification eight days before, according
to law, is dispensed with; as extra precaution, they are informed that
if they do not vote for the Executive Power, they will have to do with
the triangular cudgel.[3221] Consequently, most of them abstain; in a
town of over 600 active citizens, 40 votes give a majority; Bourgougnon
and Sarrus, the two chiefs of the Executive Power, are elected, one
mayor, and the other syndic-attorney, and henceforth the authority they
seized by force is conferred on them by the law.

IV.--Ordinary practices of the Jacobin dictatorship.

The stationary companies of the clubs.--Their personnel.
--Their leaders.

This is roughly the type of government which spring up in every commune
of France after the 10th of August; the club reigns, but the form
and processes of its dictatorship are different, according to
circumstances.--Sometimes it operates directly through an executive gang
or by lancing an excited mob; sometimes it operates indirectly through
the electoral a