ion, made and remade, no government, not even
that of their leaders, can survive. Once masters of France, they quarrel
over it amongst themselves, each claiming for himself the whole of the
prey. Those who are in office want to stay there; those who are out want
to get in. Thus is formed two factions, while each repeats against the
other the coup d'etat which both have together carried out against the
nation.--According to the ruling clique, its adversaries are simply
"anarchists," former Septembriseurs, Robespierre's confederates, the
accomplices of Babeuf, eternal conspirators. Now, as in the year VI.,
the five regents still keep the saber-hilt firm in their grasp, and can
therefore make the Legislative Corps to vote as they please. On the 22nd
of Floreal, the government cancels, in whole or in part, in forty-five
departments, the new elections, not alone those of representatives, but
again those of judges, public prosecutors, and the grand-jurymen.
Then it dismisses the terrorist administrations in the departments and
towns.[51140]--According to their adversaries (la coterie gouvernee),
the Directory and its agents are false patriots, usurpers, oppressors,
despisers of the law, squanderers and inept politicians. As all this
is true, and as the Directory, in the year VIII., used up through
its twenty-one months of omnipotence, out of credit on account of its
reverses, despised by its generals, hated by the beaten and unpaid army,
dares no longer and can no longer raise the sword, the ultra Jacobins
resume the offensive, have themselves elected through their kith and
kin, re-conquer the majority in the Legislative Corps, and, in their
turn, purge the Directory on the 30 of Prairial. Treilhard, Merlin de
Douai, and La Revelliere-Lepaux are driven out; narrow fanatics replace
them, Gohier, Moulins and Roger Ducos. Ghosts from the period of the
Terror install themselves in the ministries, Robert Lindet in the
Treasury, Fouche in the Police. Everywhere, in the departments, they put
in or restore "the exclusives," that is to say, the resolute scoundrels
who have proved their capacity.[51141] The Jacobins re-open their Club
under its old name in the hall of the Manege. Two directors and one
hundred and fifty members of the Legislative Corps fraternize with
"all that the dregs of the people provide that is vilest and most
disgusting." Eulogies are here pronounced on Robespierre and on Babeuf
himself; they demand the levy en mas