mechanics and journey-men is everywhere detestable.... The number of
discontented seems to increase from day to day. All the communes in Var,
and most of those in this department are against us.... they constitute
a race to be destroyed, a country to be colonized anew....
"I repeat it, the only way to work out the Revolution in the federalized
departments, and especially in this one, is to deport all the indigenous
population who are able to bear arms, scatter them through the armies
and put garrisons in their places, which, again, will have to be changed
from time to time."--At the other extremity of the territory, in Alsace,
"republican sentiments are still in the cradle; fanaticism is extreme
and incredible; the spirit of the inhabitants in general is in no
respect revolutionary... Nothing but the revolutionary army and the
venerated guillotine will cure them of their conceited aristocracy. The
execution of the laws depends on striking off the heads of the guilty,
for nearly all the rural municipalities are composed only of the rich,
of clerks of former bailiffs, almost always devoted to the ancient
régime."[3378]--And in the rest of France, the population, less
refractory, is not more Jacobin; here where the people appear "humble
and submissive" as in Lyons and Bordeaux, the inspectors report that
it is wholly owing to terror;[3379] there, where opinion seems
enthusiastic, as at Rochefort and Grenoble, they report that it is
"artificial heat."[3380] At Rochefort, zeal is maintained only "by the
presence of five or six Parisian Jacobins." At Grenoble, Chépy, the
political agent and president of the club, writes that "he is knocked
up, worn out, and exhausted, in trying to keep up public spirit and
maintain it on a level with events," but he is "conscious that, if he
should leave, all would crumble."--There are none other than Moderates
at Brest, at Lille, at Dunkirk; if this or that department, the Nord,
for instance, hastened to accept the "Montagnard" constitution, it is
only a pretense: "an infinitely small portion of the population answered
for the rest."[3381]--At Belfort, where "from one thousand to twelve
hundred fathers of families alone are counted," writes the agent,[3382]
"one popular club of thirty or forty members, at the most, maintains and
enforces the love of liberty."--In Arras, "out of three or four hundred
members composing the popular club" the weeding-out of 1793 has spared
but "sixty-three, one tenth of whom are absent."[3383] At Toulouse, "out
of about fourteen hundred members" who form the club, only three or four
hundred remain after the weeding-out of 1793,[3384] "mere machines,
for the most part," and "whom ten or a dozen intriguers lead as they
please."--The same state of things exists elsewhere, a dozen or two
determined Jacobins-twenty-two at Troyes, twenty-one at Grenoble, ten
at Bordeaux, seven at Poitiers, as many at Dijon-constitute the active
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