For the moment this intense desire for order was uppermost in the minds
of those few who were permitted to vote. In the Cordeliers it was the
other character of the Parisian that was emphasised and developed. They
were determined on democracy, like everybody else; but, unlike the rest,
they were not afraid of the dangerous road. They were inspired and led by
a man whose one great fault was a passionate contempt of danger. On this
account, though they are taxpayers and bourgeois, lawyers, physicians,
men of letters and the like, they do all they can to prevent the new
municipal system from coming into play, but they fail.
Now, consider the Assembly. That great body was justly afraid of Paris;
indeed, the man who was head and shoulders above them all—Mirabeau—was
for leaving Paris altogether. The Assembly, again, had the whole task of
re-making France in its hands, and it could not but will that Paris, in
the midst of which it sat, should be muzzled. Through all the debates of
the Provisional Commune it could easily be seen that Bailly and Lafayette
were winning, and that the Parliament would be even more Moderate than
they. Three points were the centres of the battle: first, the restricted
suffrage which was to be established;[73] secondly, the power which
was to be exercised over the new Commune by the authorities of the
Department; thirdly, the suppression of those sixty democratic clubs, the
districts, and their replacement by forty-eight sections, so framed as
specially to break up the ties of neighbourhood and association, which
the first of the Revolution had developed. It was aimed especially at the
Cordeliers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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