A hundred or so representatives of the Committee of Public Safety, are sent to the provinces, "with unlimited power," to establish, enforce or exacerbate the revolutionary government, and their proclamations at once explain the nature of this government.3279—"Brave and vigorous sans-culottes!" writes a deputy on leaving a mission and announcing his successor,3280 "You seem to have desired a good b... of a representative, who has never swerved from his principles, that is to say, a regular Montagnard. I have fulfilled your wishes, and you will have the same thing in citizen Ingrand. Remember, brave sans-culottes, that, with the patriot Ingrand, you can do everything, get anything, cancel whatever you please, imprison, bring to trial, deport and guillotine every-body and regenerate society. Don't try to play with him; everybody is afraid of him, he overcomes all resistance and restores at once the most complete order!"—The representative arrives at the center of the department by post, and presents his credentials. All the authorities at once bow to the ground. In the evening, in his saber and plume, he harangues the popular club, blowing into a flame the smoldering embers of Jacobinism. Then, according to his personal acquaintances, if he has any in the place, or according to the votes of the Committee of General Security, if he is a new-comer, he selects five or six of the "warmest sans-culottes" there, and, forming them into a Revolutionary Committee, installs them permanently at his side, sometimes in the same building, in a room next to his own, where, on lists or with verbal communications furnished to him, he works with a will and without stopping.3281

First comes a purification of all the local authorities. They must always remember that "there can be no exaggeration in behalf of the people; he who is not imbued with this principle, who has not put it in practice, cannot remain on an advanced post;"3282 consequently, at the popular club, in the department, in the district, in the municipality, all doubtful men are excluded, discharged, or incarcerated; if a few weak ones are retained provisionally, or by favor, they are berated and taught their duty very summarily:

"They will strive, by a more energetic and assiduous patriotism, to atone for the evil committed by them in not doing all the good they could do."

Sometimes, through a sudden change of scene, the entire administrative staff is kicked out so as to give place to a no less complete staff, which the same kick brings up out of the ground. Considering that "everything stagnates in Vaucluse, and that a frightful moderation paralyses the most revolutionary measures," Maignet, in one order3283 appoints the administrators and secretary of the department, the national agent, the administrators and council-general of the district, the administrators, council-general and national agent of Avignon, the president, public prosecutor and recorder of the criminal court, members of the Tribunal de Commerce, the collector of the district, the post-master and the head of the squadron of gendarmerie. And the new functionaries will certainly go to work at once, each in his office. The summary process, which has brusquely swept away the first set of puppets, is going to brusquely install the second one. "Each citizen appointed to any of the above mentioned offices, shall betake himself immediately to his post, under penalty of being declared suspect," on the simple notification of his appointment. Universal and passive obedience of governors, as well as of the governed! There are no more elected and independent functionaries; all the authorities, confirmed or created by the representative, are in his hands; there is not one among them who does not subsist or survive solely through his favor; there is not one of them who acts otherwise than according to his approval or by his order. Directly, or through them, he makes requisitions, sequestrates or confiscates as he sees fit, taxes, imprisons, transports or decapitates as he see fit, and, in his circumscription, he is the pasha.

But he is a pasha with a chain around his neck, and at short tether.—From and after December, 1793, he is directed "to conform to the orders of the Committee of Public Safety and report to it every ten days."3284 The circumscription in which he commands is rigorously "limited;" "he is reputed to be without power in the other departments,"3285 while he is not allowed to grow old on his post. "In every magistrature the grandeur and extent of power is compensated by the shortness of its duration. Over-prolonged missions would soon be considered as birthrights."3286 Therefore, at the end of two or three months, often at the end of a month, the incumbent is recalled to Paris or dispatched elsewhere, at short notice, on the day named, in a prompt, absolute and sometimes threatening tone, not as a colleague one humors, but as a subordinate who is suddenly and arbitrarily revoked or displaced because he is deemed inadequate, or "used up." For greater security, oftentimes a member of the Committee, Couthon, Collot, Saint-Just, or some near relation of a member of the Committee, a Lebas or young Robespierre, goes personally to the spot to give the needed impulsion; sometimes, agents simply of the Committee, taken from outside the Convention, and without any personal standing, quite young men, Rousselin, Julien de la DrÔme, replace or watch the representative with powers equal to his.—At the same time, from the top and from the center, he is pushed on and directed: his local counselors are chosen for him, and the directors of his conscience;3287 they rate him soundly on the choice of his agents or of his lodgings;3288 they force dismissals on him, appointments, arrests, executions; they spur him on in the path of terror and suffering.—Around him are paid emissaries,3289 while others watch him gratis and constantly write to the Committees of Public Safety and General Security, often to denounce him, always to report on his conduct, to judge his measures and to provoke the measures which he does not take.3290

Whatever he may have done or may do, he cannot turn his eyes toward Paris without seeing danger ahead, a mortal danger which, on the Committee, in the Convention, at the Jacobin Club, increases or will increase against him, like a tempest.—Briez, who, in Valenciennes under siege, showed courage, and whom the Convention had just applauded and added to the Committee of Public Safety, hears himself reproached for being still alive: "He who was at Valenciennes when the enemy took it will never reply to this question—are you dead?"3291 He has nothing to do now but to declare himself incompetent, decline the honor mistakenly conferred on him by the Convention, and disappear.—Dubois-CrancÉ took Lyons, and, as pay for this immense service, he is stricken off the roll of the Jacobin Club; because he did not take it quick enough, he is accused of treachery; two days after the capitulation, the Committee of Public Safety withdraw his powers; three days after the capitulation, the Committee of Public Safety has him arrested and sent to Paris under escort.3292—If such men after such services are thus treated, what is to become of the others? After the mission of young Julien, then Carrier at Nantes, Ysabeau and Tallien at Bordeaux, feel their heads shake on their shoulders; after the mission of Robespierre jr. in the East and South, Barras, FrÉron and Bernard de Saintes believe themselves lost.3293 FouchÉ, RovÈre, Javogue, and how many others, compromised by the faction, HÉbertists or Dantonists, of which they are, or were belonging. Sure of perishing if their patrons on the Committee succumb; not sure of living if their patrons keep their place; not knowing whether their heads will not be exchanged for others; restricted to the narrowest, the most rigorous and most constant orthodoxy; guilty and condemned should their orthodoxy of to-day become the heterodoxy of to-morrow. All of them menaced, at first the hundred and eighty autocrats who, before the concentration of the revolutionary government, ruled for eight months boundlessly in the provinces; next, and above all, the fifty hard-fisted "Montagnards," unscrupulous fanatics or authoritarian high livers, who, at this moment, tread human flesh under foot and spread out in arbitrariness like wild boars in a forest, or wallow in scandal, like swine in a mud-pool.

There is no refuge for them, other than temporary, and temporary refuge only in zealous and tried obedience, such as the Committee demands proof of, that is to say, through rigor.—"The Committees so wanted it," says later on Maignet, the arsonist of BÉdouin; "The Committees did everything..... Circumstances controlled me. ... The patriotic agents conjured me not to give way.... I did not fully carry out the most imperative orders."3294 Similarly, the great exterminator of Nantes, Carrier, when urged to spare the rebels who surrendered of their own accord:

"Do you want me to be guillotined? It is not in my power to save those people."3295

And another time:

"I have my orders; I must observe them; I do not want to have my head cut off!"

Under penalty of death, the representative on mission is a Terrorist, like his colleagues in the Convention and on the Committee of Public Safety, but with a much more serious disturbance of his nervous and his moral system; for he does not operate like them on paper, at a distance, against categories of abstract, anonymous and vague beings; his work is not merely an effort of the intellect, but also of the senses and the imagination. If he belongs to the region, like Lecarpentier, Barras, Lebon, Javogue, Couthon, AndrÉ Dumont and many others, he is well acquainted with the families he proscribes; names to him are not merely so many letters strung together, but they recall personal souvenirs and evoke living forms. At all events, he is the spectator, artisan and beneficiary of his own dictatorship; the silver-plate and money he confiscates passes under his eye, through his hands; he sees the "suspects" he incarcerates march before him; he is in the court-room on the rendering of the sentence of death; frequently, the guillotine he has supplied with heads works under his windows; he sleeps in the mansion of an emigrÉ he makes requisitions for the furniture, linen and wine belonging to the decapitated and the imprisoned,3296 lies in their beds, drinks their wine and revels with plenty of company at their expense, and in their place. In the same way as a bandit chief who neither kills nor robs with his own hands, but has murder and robbery committed in his presence, by which he substantially profits, not by proxy, but personally, through the well-directed blows ordered by him.—To this degree, and in such proximity to physical action, omnipotence is a noxious atmosphere which no state of health can resist. Restored to the conditions which poisoned man in barbarous times or countries, he is again attacked by moral maladies from which he was thenceforth believed to be exempt; he retrogrades even to the strange corruptions of the Orient and the Middle Ages; forgotten leprosies, apparently extinct, with exotic pestilences to which civilized lands seemed closed, reappear in his soul with their issues and tumors.