of siege, its daily
violence, only exasperate the mute antipathy.

"Everything has been done," says an honest Jacobin,[51130] "to alienate
the immense majority of citizens from the Revolution and the Republic,
even those who had contributed to the downfall of the monarchy...
Instead of seeing the friends of the Revolution increase as we have
advanced on the revolutionary path.... we see our ranks thinning out and
the early defenders of liberty deserting our cause."

It is impossible for the Jacobins to rally France and reconcile her
to their ways and dogmas, and on this point their own agents leave no
illusion.

"Here," writes the Troyes agent,[51131] "public spirit not only needs
to be revived, but it needs to be re-created. Scarcely one-fifth of the
citizens side with the government, and this fifth is hated and despised
by the majority.... Who attend upon and celebrate the national fetes?
Public functionaries whom the law summons to them, and many of these
fetes often dispense with them. It is the same public spirit which does
not allow honest folks to take part in them and in the addresses made at
them, and which keeps those women away who ought to be their principal
ornament.... The same public spirit looks only with indifference and
contempt on the republican, heroic actions given on the stage, and
welcomes with transport all that bears any allusion to royalty and the
ancient regime. The parvenus themselves of the Revolution, the generals,
the deputies, dislike Jacobin institutions;[51132] they place children
in the chapel schools and send them to the confessional, while the
deputies who, in '92 and '93, showed the most animosity to priests,
do not consider their daughter well brought up unless she has made her
first communion. "--

The little are still more hostile than the great.

"A fact unfortunately too true," writes the commissary of a rural
canton,[51133] "is that the people en masse seem not to want any of our
institutions.... It is considered well-bred, even among country folks,
to show disdain for everything characteristic of republican usages...
Our rich farmers, who have profited most by the Revolution, are the
bitterest enemies of its forms: any citizen who depended on them for the
slightest favor and thought it well to address them as citizen, would be
turned out of their houses."

To call someone Citizen is an insult, and patriot a still greater one;
for this term signifies Jacobin, partisan,