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at first in the publicity and freedom which accompanied its installation. The public felt as free as in 1789, and showed it by the formation of clubs and the issuing of journals representing every party. The reactionists or Royalists, as some of them no doubt were, met in the Rue de Clichy, which gave its name to their club. The anti-Jacobins, who did not go such lengths, formed a constitutional club in the Hôtel de Salm, of which Barbé Marbois, Tronson Du Coudray, Thibaudeau, and Talleyrand were members. The sans-culottes met in the refectory of the Genovéfan Convent, long after the public library of the Pantheon, behind which it was situated. Here were renewed the eloquence and the politics of the Jacobins and Cordeliers.*

To such menaces and obstructions the Convention had not only opposed the guillotine and the terror, but latterly the successes of its armies. Both these resources at first failed the Directory. The true strength of the republic lay indeed in the army, the members of which had gained more by the revolution than any other class. The lowly-born saw the privilege of birth disappear before them; military talent found a quick reward. The royalist princes of ancient France were in the ranks of their enemies, and whether on the Rhine or on La Vendée, were the inveterate foes of the modern French soldier such as the revolution had made. With the generals, however, this attachment of the military masses to the existing government did not hold. The Convention had been cruel and unjust to them. The Directory promised no better. And although the far greater number remained true to the faith and fortune of the republican colours, there were some who, like Dumourier, foresaw the restoration of royalty as a necessity, and were ready to be the instruments of that change. Amongst these was Pichegru, the conqueror

*Thibaudeau, Dumas Souvenirs.

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of Holland, who first a soldier, before the revolution, had been promoted, and made a sergeant by the Prince of Condé. They thus knew each other. In August, 1795, the prince by an agent sounded Pichegru, who appeared but too ready to serve the Bourbons. He could have done so at once but for the hesitation of Condé. The French general consented to conduct the operations of his army in concert with the general of the enemy.* He repassed the Rhine; Jourdan, who was on the right bank farther north, being thus left unsupported, was obliged to withdraw. The French were subsequently beaten from their lines before Mayence. The Directory warned, recalled Pichegru in time, but the reverses of the campaign could not be prevented.

To discover and defeat the underground efforts of the Royalists and Jacobins, the Directory in December, 1795, established what became a permanent institution of the country, a ministry of police. Cochon first held the office, and it was certainly no sinecure. Royalist agents were ubiquitous and active; the Anarchists at first more menacing and open. As of old, they addressed most furious petitions to the assembly. One, drawn up and presented by the sans-culottes of the south, aroused all the passions of the Cinq Cents. The petitioners were not without cause of complaint. The terrible excesses of the Anarchists in the towns of the Rhone and Mediterranean had, as may well be supposed, created a host of vindictive enemies, the relations of the thousands despoiled and murdered. These relatives, since Thermidor, had returned from emigration or raised their heads from terrified submission. They found Jacobins in possession of their lands and houses, living in the presbyteries, and tilling the confiscated property of the churches. The anti-terrorists formed societies for the purpose of vengeance,† called Compagnons de Jésus et du

* Memoirs of Montgaillard, of Faucheborel, and Gouvion St. Cyr.

For their doings see Souvenirs de Charles Nodier.

Soleil. They massacred the Jacobins and all those who had imbued their hands in the blood of royalist or civic victims, and in a lapse of time slew if not as many victims as the revolutionists, certainly enough for large expiation. The terrorists of the south, thus terrorised in their turn, complained that since Thermidor the government commissaries did not hold out to them sufficient aid or protection. An animated debate ensued, which called forth once more an indignant speech from the Girondin Isnard, who exposed the recent attempts at resuscitating Jacobinism in Marseilles. Under its influence the Cinq Cents set aside the petition by the order of the day.

Such a cool dismissal of their complaints proved to the ultra-revolutionary party, the resuscitated Jacobins of the Pantheon, that nothing was to be hoped from the assemblies which formed the legislature under the new constitution. The restoration of the old constitution, that of 1793, and the Convention, or a Convention, became in consequence their fixed idea and dominant aim. To mature and accomplish it, they formed as of old an insurrectionary committee of public safety, which met in secret, re-enlisted all the old agents of insurrection, and exerted their utmost to rally and reconstitute the revolutionary army of the rabble, which had well nigh lost its vocation.

The original Jacobins were numerous enough to divide their respective duties. The Marats and the Desmoulins blew the trumpet of the press, the Legendres and Santerres marshalled the masses, the Robespierres and Dantons perorated. But the men of action had been cut off; there remained but the theorists and the scribblers. Babœuf, originally a land-surveyor, was one of these. He was a journalist of the school of Marat, and who had consequently spent almost as much time in prison as out of it. This gave him leisure for reflection and for the concoction of

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theories. The Jacobin doctrine of transferring to the poor the property of the rich was nothing new, and had been practised all through the revolution. Babuf erected it into a system, and first preached that community of goods which has grown up to be a philosophy and a creed in our days. He came too late in the revolution, however, for his or any other theory, to be listened to. The working class was disgusted with the revolution, which had brought to it nothing save decimation and famine. But there were still some thousands of professional insurrectionists in Paris, and Babœuf's system promised them plunder. It was not the more unwelcome for the plunder being necessarily prefaced by bloodshed. The plan of Babœuf's conspiracy was to slay all the authorities, recal and recomplete the convention with the Babouviens, restore the maximum, the requisition, and the terror, and resuscitate the state of things which Thermidor had interrupted. A captain named Gressel disclosed the whole plot to Carnot, and almost all the conspirators, with their papers, were seized in one night in May 1796.

Babœuf was so confident, that almost his first act, when arrested and his whole plot discovered, was to threaten the government and make an offer of forbearance only on condition of his scheme of social revolution being adopted. He was under a profound delusion. The men and the ideas so formidable in 1793 had become powerless and effete in 1796. The people, still closely pressed by famine,* were not to be moved. No party in the councils or no large portion of the population could succeed in making political capital out of anarchy. Drouet alone, the former postmaster of Varennes, was implicated in Babœuf's plot. His being absent from France in an Austrian prison left him unaware how

The people of Paris received but three-quarters of a pound of bread each per day through the greater

part of 1796. Decree of Directory in Aug.

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much public opinion had progressed. He contrived, CHAP. however, to escape from prison.* Amongst those who were sent to Verdun were the well-known insurrectionist names of Amar, Verdier, Chaudieu, Antonelli, Rossignol. They were sent to Vendome, where a high court of justice was selected to try them.

There were some feeble attempts to create a tumult in the night appointed for the removal of Babœuf and his accomplices, which was towards the end of August. A more serious effort was made on the night of the 9th of September. Some four or five hundred Anarchists, incompletely armed, collected in Vaugirard, and favoured by the darkness penetrated into the military camp then formed on the Plaine de Grenelle. Their hopes were built upon a certain regiment of dragoons, the 21st, which was to favour them. But when they approached its cantonment, they met with no signs of adherence, whilst the soldiers in general prepared to resist and capture the fellows, who came crying, "Down with the Convention and the Directory." A major of the 21st regiment of dragoons, named Malo, mounted on horseback, collected some men and charged the intruders, who were soon dispersed and taken to the number of between two or three hundred. Some thirty were condemned by court-martial and shot, the rest were ordered to be transported. This tumult rendered it necessary to treat Babœuf and his accomplices with severity. Their trial lasted long, but Babœuf and his second Darthé were condemned to death, and executed after having made feeble attempts at suicide. Some more were condemned to transportation; amongst them Buonarotti, who lived to be the historian of the conspiracy.†

The ease with which the Directory put down this last

Changing his name, Drouet managed to earn his bread as an artisan.

† Buonarotti, Hist. de la Conspi

ration. Procés de Babœuf. Fleury's
Babœuf. Granier de Cassagnac,
Histoire du Directoire.

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