By the side of the Committee of Public Safety, the Commune of Paris occupied an independent position. Although nominally merely the body administering the affairs of the capital, it in reality took the lead in directing the general affairs of France. After it had accomplished the insurrection against the Girondists, it was the strongest power in Paris. It had armed bands of ruffians in its pay; the national guard was under its orders; the revolutionary and civil committees of the sections were its tools; and, for the time, it had the support of the populace, which it supplied with bread. The Committee of Public Safety dared as little as the Mountain risk collision with it. It forced its supporters into the government offices; sent agents into the departments; exerted influence over deputies in mission, and compelled the Convention to appoint ministers and generals of its selection, and to make laws in accordance with its wishes. The action of the Commune had for long been mainly directed by two men, Chaumette and Hébert. They had both been members of the insurrectionary Commune which had driven Louis from the Tuileries in 1792, and after its re-election had been ordered by the Convention in the autumn of the same year, they had reappeared at the Hôtel de Ville, where they filled the influential position of law officers to the new Commune, which was made up in part of the same men, and was animated by the same spirit as its predecessor. Their ascendancy was now signalised by an extraordinary outburst of cruelty and fanaticism. Not content with the abolition of political and civil distinctions between man and man, they sought to destroy all superiorities and to put men socially and intellectually on the same level. The superiority of wealth was a special object of their attack. Capitalists, bankers, speculators, large landowners, were by them and their followers classed along with federalists, Girondists, nobles, priests, and royalists, as enemies to the republic. Intellectual superiority and culture became a crime in their possessors. Equality, in short, was to be produced not by the raising of the lower, but by the degradation of the higher. If Hébert demanded the establishment of a primary school in every village, he was actuated not so much by a regard for the moral and intellectual results of education as by the wish to make the working classes independent of the upper. Higher education, more especially classical education, was decried. Valuable books, statues, and works of art which bore trace of having been produced under the monarchy, were wantonly destroyed. Ignorance and rags were put forward as in themselves giving a claim to respect, and the term ‘sans-culotte,’ ‘the breechless’ (applied to the poor from their wearing trowsers in place of knee-breeches), was held synonymous with that of ‘patriot.’ The words ‘Monsieur’ and ‘Madame’ were replaced by ‘citoyen’ and ‘citoyenne,’ and an untidy dress, a