vatives, and imposes on each elector a verbal public vote,
loud and clear, on his name being called; that is to say, if he does
not vote as he ought to, he risks the gallows.[3324] Nothing could more
surely convert hesitation and indecision into good sense, while, in
many a place, still more powerful machinery is violently opposed to
the elections. At Paris the elections are carried on in the midst of
atrocities, under the pikes of the butchers, and con ducted by their
instigators. At Meaux and at Rheims the electors in session were within
hearing of the screeches of the murdered priests. At Rheims the butchers
themselves ordered the electoral assembly to elect their candidates,
Drouet, the famous post-master, and Armonville, a tipsy wool-carder,
upon which one-half of the assembly withdrew, while the two candidates
of the assassins are elected. At Lyons, two days after the massacre, the
Jacobin commander writes to the Minister: "Yesterday's catastrophe puts
the aristocrats to flight, and ensures us the majority in Lyons."[3325]
From universal suffrage thus subjected to so much sifting, submitted to
such heavy pressure, heated and refined in the revolutionary alembic,
those who control it obtain all they want, a concentrated extract, the
quintessence of the Jacobin spirit.

And yet, should this extract not seem to them sufficiently strong,
wherever they are sovereign, they throw it away and begin over again. At
Paris,[3326] by means of a purifying and surplus ballot, the new Council
of the Commune undertakes the expulsion of its lukewarm members, while
d'Ormesson, the mayor elect of the moderates, is assailed with so
many threats that, on the verge of his installation, he resigns. At
Lyons,[3327] another moderate, Niviere-Chol, twice elected, and, by
9,000 out of 11,000 votes, is twice compelled to abandon his place;
after him, Gilibert, the physician, who, supported by the same voters,
is about to obtain the majority, is seized suddenly and cast into
prison; even in prison, he is elected; the clubbists confine him
there more rigidly, and do not let him out even after extorting
his resignation.--Elsewhere in the rural cantons, for example, in
Franche-Comte,[3328] a number of elections are canceled when the person
elected happens to be a Catholic. The Jacobin minority frequently
secede, meet in a tavern, elect their mayor or justice of the peace, and
the validity of his election is secured because he is a patriot; so much