year
V., with supporting documents, and especially a letter of the director
of the jury, on the violence committed by, and the reign of, the
Jacobins in Aries.) Their party "is composed of the vilest artisans
and nearly all the sailors." The municipality recruited amongst former
terrorists, "has enforced for a year back the agrarian law, devastation
of the forests, pillage of the wheat-crops, by bands of armed men under
pretext of the right of gleaning, the robbery of animals at the plough
as well as of the flocks," etc.]

[Footnote 33139: Ibid., F.7, 7171. "These commissioners (of the quarter)
notify the exclusives, and even swindlers, when warrants are out against
them.... The same measures carried out in the primary assemblies on the
1st of Thermidor last, in the selection of municipal officers, have been
successfully revived in the organization of the National Guard--threats,
insults, shouting, assaults, compulsory ejection from meetings then
governed by the amnestied, finally, the appointment of the latter to
the principal offices. In effect, all, beginning with the places of
battalion leaders and reaching to those of corporals, are exclusively
filled by their partisans. The result is that the honest, to whom
serving with men regarded by them with aversion is repugnant, employ
substitutes instead of mounting guard themselves, the security of the
town being in the hands of those who themselves ought to be watched."]

[Footnote 33140: Archives Nationales, F.7, 3273. (Letter of Merard,
former administrator and judge in 1790 and 1791, in years III., IV.
and V., to the Minister, Apt, Pluviose 15, year III., with personal
references and documentary evidence.) "I can no longer refrain at the
sight of so many horrors.... The justices of the peace and the director
of the jury excuse themselves on the ground that no denunciations
or witnesses are brought forward. Who would dare appear against men
arrogating to themselves the title of superior patriots, foremost
in every revolutionary crisis, and with friends in every commune and
protectors in all high places? The favor they enjoyed was such that
the commune of Gordes was free of any levy of conscripts and from all
requisitions. People thus disposed, they said, to second civic
and administrative views, could not be humored too much..... This
discouraging state of things simply results from the weakness,
inexperience, ignorance, apathy and immorality of the public
functionar