Germinal, to renew the Commune, in Floreal, to renew the
ministries, in Prairial, to re-compose the revolutionary Tribunal,
month after month, purging and re-constituting the committees of
each quarter[3318] of the city. In vain does Robespierre, writing
and re-writing his secret lists, try to find men able to maintain
the system; he always falls back on the same names, those of unknown
persons, illiterate, about a hundred knaves or fools with four or five
second-class despots or fanatics among them, as malevolent and as narrow
as himself.--The purifying crucible has been used too often and for too
long a time; it has overheated; what was sound, or nearly so, in the
elements of the primitive fluid has been forcibly evaporated; the rest
has fermented and become acid; nothing remains in the bottom of the
vessel but the lees of stupidity and wickedness, their concentrated and
corrosive dregs.

II. Subaltern Jacobins.

Quality of subaltern leaders.--How they rule in the section
assemblies.--How they seize and hold office.

Such are the subordinate sovereigns[3319] who in Paris, during 14 months
dispose as they please, of fortunes, liberties and lives.--And first,
in the section assemblies, which still maintain a semblance of popular
sovereignty, they rule despotically and uncontested.--

"A dozen or fifteen men wearing a red cap,[3320] well-informed or not,
claim the exclusive right of speaking and acting, and if any other
citizen with honest motives happens to propose measures which he thinks
proper, and which really are so, no attention is paid to these measures,
or, if it is, it is only to show the members composing the assemblage
of how little account they are. These measures are accordingly rejected,
solely because they are not presented by one of the men in a red cap, or
by somebody like themselves, initiated in the mysteries of the section."

"Sometimes," says one of the leaders,[3321] "we find only ten members of
the club at the general assembly of the section; but there are enough
of us to intimidate the rest. Should any citizen of the section make a
proposition we do not like, we rise and shout that he is an schemer,
or a signer (of former constitutional petitions). In this way we impose
silence on those who are not in line with the club."--

Since September, 1793, operation is all the easier because the majority,
is now composed of beasts of burden, ruled with an iron hand.

"When somethin