for preferring them to their adversaries. At
bottom, the government installed by the recent electoral comedy, for
the major portion of the Parisians, has no authority but the fact of
its existence; people put up with it because there is no other, fully
recognizing its worthlessness;[3359] it is a government of strangers, of
interlopers, of bunglers, of cantankerous, weak and violent persons. The
Convention has no hold either on the people or on the bourgeois class,
and in proportion as it glides more rapidly down the revolutionary hill,
it breaks one by one the ties with which it is still connected to the
undecided.

In a reign of eight months the Convention has alienated public
opinion entirely. "Almost all who have property of any kind are
conservative,"[3360] and all the conservatives are against it. "The
gendarmes here openly speak up against the Revolution, even up to the
revolutionary tribunal, whose judgments they loudly condemn. All the old
soldiers detest the actual order of things."[3361]--The volunteers "who
come back from the army appear angry at putting the King to death, and
on that account they would flay all the Jacobins."[3362]--No party in
the Convention escapes this universal disaffection and growing aversion.
"If the question of guillotining the members of the Convention could be
put to an open vote, it would be carried against them by a majority of
nineteen-twentieths,"[3363] which, in fact, is about the proportion of
electors who, through fright or disgust, keep away from the polls. Let
the "Right" or the "Left" of the Convention be victors or vanquished,
that is a matter which concerns them; the public at large does not enter
into the discussions of its conquerors, and no longer cares for either
Gironde or "Mountain." Its old grievances always revive "against the
Vergniauds, Guadets" and company;[3364] it does not like them, and has
no confidence in them, and will let them be crushed without helping
them. The infuriates may expel the Thirty-Two, if they choose, and put
them under lock and key. "There is nothing the aristocracy (meaning
by this, owners of property, merchants, bankers, the rich, and the
well-to-do), desire so much as to see them guillotined."[3365] 'Even the
inferior aristocracy (meaning petty tradesmen and head-workmen) take
no more interest in their fate than if they were so many escaped wild
beasts... again caught and put in their cages."[3366] "Guadet, Petion,
Brissot, would no