Provence, where things are more advanced and corruption
is greater than elsewhere, where the purport and aims of the Revolution
were comprehended at the start, it is still worse. Nowhere did Jacobin
rulers display their real character more openly, and nowhere, from
1789 to 1799, was this character so well maintained. At Toulon, the
demagogues in the year V., as in the year II., are[33137] "former
workmen and clerks in the Arsenal who had become 'bosses' by acting as
informers and through terrorism, getting property for nothing, or at an
insignificant price, and plotting sales of national possessions, petty
traders from all quarters with stocks of goods acquired in all sorts of
ways, through robberies, through purchases of stolen goods from servants
and employees in the civil, war and navy departments, and through
abandoned or bought-up claims; in a word, men who, having run away from
other communes, pass their days in coffee-houses and their nights in
houses of ill-fame."--At Draguignan, Brignolles, Vidauban, Frejus,
at Marseilles, after Thermidor, the intermittent returns to Terrorism
always restore the same quarries of the justiciary and the police to
office.[33138] "Artisans, once useful, but now tired of working,
and whom the profession of paid clubbists, idle guardians," and paid
laborers "has totally demoralized," scoundrels in league with each
other and making money out of whatever they can lay their hands on,
like thieves at a fair, habitually living at the expense of the public,
"bestowing the favors of the nation on those who share their principles,
harboring and aiding many who are under the ban of the law and calling
themselves model patriots,[33139] that is, in the pay of gambling hells
and houses of prostitution."--In the rural districts, the old bands
"consisting of hordes of homeless brigands" who worked so well during
the anarchy of the Constituent and Legislative assemblies, form anew
during the anarchy of the Directory; they make their appearance in the
vicinity of Apt "commencing with petty robberies and then, strong in
the impunity and title of sans-culottes, break into farm-houses, rob and
massacre the inmates, strip travelers, put to ransom all who happen
to cross their path, force open and pillage houses in the commune of
Gorges, stop women in the streets, tear off their rings and crosses,"
and attack the hospital, sacking it from top to bottom, while the
town and military officers, just like them,