blindness is due to the physique of the
country, which is very rich." Naturally, he storms and dismisses; but,
even in the revolutionary committee, none but dubious candidates are
presented to him for selection; he does not know how to manage in order
to renew the local authorities. "They play into each others' hands," and
he ends by threatening to transfer the public institutions of the
town elsewhere, if they persist in proposing to him none but bad
patriots.--At Strasbourg,[3376] Couturier, and Dentzel, on mission,
report that: "owing to an unexampled coalition among all the capable
citizens, obstinately refusing to take the office of mayor, in order,
by this course, to clog the wheels, and subject the representatives to
repeated and indecent refusals," he is compelled to appoint a young
man, not of legal age, and a stranger in the department.--At Marseilles,
write the agents,[3377] "in spite of every effort and our ardent desire
to republicanize the Marseilles people, our pains and fatigues are
nearly all fruitless.... Public spirit among owners of property,
mechanics and journey-men is everywhere detestable.... The number of
discontented seems to increase from day to day. All the communes in Var,
and most of those in this department are against us.... they constitute
a race to be destroyed, a country to be colonized anew....

"I repeat it, the only way to work out the Revolution in the federalized
departments, and especially in this one, is to deport all the indigenous
population who are able to bear arms, scatter them through the armies
and put garrisons in their places, which, again, will have to be changed
from time to time."--At the other extremity of the territory, in Alsace,
"republican sentiments are still in the cradle; fanaticism is extreme
and incredible; the spirit of the inhabitants in general is in no
respect revolutionary... Nothing but the revolutionary army and the
venerated guillotine will cure them of their conceited aristocracy. The
execution of the laws depends on striking off the heads of the guilty,
for nearly all the rural municipalities are composed only of the rich,
of clerks of former bailiffs, almost always devoted to the ancient
regime."[3378]--And in the rest of France, the population, less
refractory, is not more Jacobin; here where the people appear "humble
and submissive" as in Lyons and Bordeaux, the inspectors report that
it is wholly owing to terror;[3379] there, where opinion see