This is the way in which the government of 1793 is brought back to life:

The concentration of all public powers in the hands of an oligarchy, a dictatorship exercised by about a hundred men grouped around five or six leaders.

More independent, more despotic and less provisional than any Committee of Public Safety, the Directory has arrogated to itself the legal right of placing a commune in a state of siege, of introducing troops within the constitutional circle5175 in such a way that it may, at its discretion, violate Paris and the Legislative Corps. In this body, mutilated by it and watched by its hireling assassins,5176 sit the passive mutes who feel themselves "morally proscribed and half-deported,"5177 who abandon debate, and vote with its stipendiaries and valets.5178 As a matter of fact, the two councils have, as formerly the Convention, become chambers "of registry" of legislative mechanism charged with the duty of countersigning its orders.—Its sway over the subordinate authorities is still more absolute. In forty-nine departments, specially designated by decree, all the administrators of departments, cantons and municipalities, all mayors, civil and criminal judges, all justices of the peace, all elected by popular suffrage, are dismissed en masse,5179 while the cleaning out in the rest of France is almost as sweeping. We can judge by one example: in the department of Doubs, which is not put down among those to be purged, five hundred and thirty administrators or municipal magistrates are dismissed in 1797, and, in addition, forty-nine others in 1798. The Directory puts its creatures in their places: suddenly, the departmental, cantonal, municipal and judicial system, which was American, becomes Napoleonic so that the local officials, instead of being delegates of the people, are government delegates.—Note, especially, the most threatening of all usurpations, the way in which this government takes justice into its hands and attributes to itself the right of life and death over persons: not only does it break up common criminal courts and reorganize them as it pleases, not only does it renew and select among the purest Jacobins judges of the court of appeals, but again, in each military division, it institutes a special and expeditious court without appeal, composed of docile officers, sub-officers and soldiers, which is to condemn and execute within twenty-four hours, under pretext of emigration or priesthood, every man who is obnoxious to the ruling factions.—As to the twenty-five millions of subjects it has just acquired, there is no refuge: it is forbidden even to complain. Forty-two opposition or "suspect" journals are silenced at one stroke, their stock plundered, or their presses broken up; three months after this, sixteen more take their turn, and, in a year, eleven others; the proprietors, editors, publishers and contributors, among whom are La Harpe, Fontanes, FiÈvÉ, Michaud and Lacretelle, a large body of honorable or prominent writers, the four or five hundred men who compose the staff of the profession, all condemned without trial to banishment,5180 or to imprisonment, are arrested, take flight, conceal themselves, or keep silent. The only voice now heard in France is the mega-phone of the government.

Naturally, the faculty of voting is as restricted as the faculty of writing, so that the victors of Fructidor, together with the right to speak, now also monopolize the right of electing.—Right away the government renewed the decree which the expiring Convention had rendered against allies or relations of ÉmigrÉs. moreover, it excluded all relatives or supporters of the members of the primary assemblies, and forbade the primary assemblies to choose any of these for electors. Henceforth, all upright or even peaceful citizens consider themselves as warned and stay at home. Voting is the act of a ruler, and therefore a privilege of the new sovereigns, which is the view of it entertained by both sovereigns and subjects:5181 "a republican minority operating legally must prevail against a majority influenced by royalism."5182 They are to see the government on election days, launching forth "in each department its commission agents, and controlling votes by threats and all sorts of promises and seductions,5183 arresting the electors and presidents of the primary assemblies," even pouncing on refractory Jacobins, invalidating the returns of a majority when not satisfactory to them, and rendering the choice of a minority valid, if it suited them, in short, constituting itself the chief elector of all local and central authorities.—Finally, all institutions, laws, public and private rights, are down, and the nation, body and soul, again becomes, as under Robespierre, the property of its rulers with this sole difference, that the kings of Terror, postponing their constitution, openly proclaim their omnipotence, whilst the others hypocritically rule under a constitution which they have themselves destroyed, and reign by virtue of a title which interdicts royalty to them.

They, too, maintain themselves by Terror; only, like so many Tartuffes, they are not disposed to act openly as executioners. The Directory, heir to the Convention, affects to repudiate its inheritance: "Woe," says Boulay de la Meurthe, "to whoever would re-establish scaffolds." There is to be no guillotine; its purveyors have been too strongly denounced; they stand too near the red stream and view with too great nervous horror those who fed it. It is better to employ death at a distance, lingering and spontaneous, with no effusion of human blood, "dry," less repulsive than the other sort, but more painful and not less certain; this shall be imprisonment on the marshes of Rochefort, and, better still, transportation to the feverish coasts of Guyanna: there is no distinction between the mode used by the Convention and that of the Directory, except the distinction between to kill and to cause death.5184 Moreover, every brutality that can be employed to repress the indignation of the proscribed by fear is exhausted on the way.—The first convoy which bears away, with thirteen others, BarthÉlÉmy, who negotiated the treaty of Basle, Pichegru, the conqueror of Holland, Lafond-LadÉbat, president of the council of the Five Hundred, BarbÉ-Marbois, president of the council of the Ancients, was at first provided with carriages.5185 An order of the Directory substitutes for these the prison van, an iron car with one door bolted and padlocked, and, overhead, openings through which the rain poured in streams, and with common boards for seats. This lumbering machine without springs rolls along at a fast trot along the ruts in the road, each jolt sending the condemned inmates against the hard oak sides and roof; one of these, on reaching Blois, "shows his black-and-blue elbows." The man selected to command this escort is the vilest and most brutal reprobate in the army, Dutertre, a coppersmith foreman before the Revolution, next an officer and sentenced to be put in irons for stealing in the La VendÉe war, and such a natural robber that he again robs his men of their pay on the road; he is evidently qualified for his work. On stopping at Blois, "he passes the night in an orgy with his brothers and friends," fellow-thieves and murderers as above described. He curses Madame BarbÉ-Marbois who comes to take leave of her husband, dismissing on the spot the commandant of the gendarmerie who supports her in a swoon, and, noticing the respect and attentions which all the inhabitants, even the functionaries, show to the prisoners, he cries out, "Well, what airs and graces for people that will perhaps be dead in three or four days!" On the vessel which transports them, and still in sight of Rochelle, a boat is observed rowing vigorously to overtake them and they hear a shout of "I am Lafond-LadÉbat's son! Allow me to embrace my father!" A speaking-trumpet from the vessel replies: "Keep away or you'll be fired on!"—Their cabins, on the voyage, are noxious; they are not allowed to be on deck more than four at a time, one hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. The sailors and soldiers are forbidden to speak to them; their food consists of a sailor's ration, and this is spoilt; toward the end of the voyage they are starved. In Guyanna they are allowed one candle to a mess, and no table-linen; they lack water, or it is not drinkable; out of sixteen taken to Sinnamary only two survive.

Those who are deported the following year, priests, monks, deputies, journalists and artisans accused of emigration, fare worse. On all the roads leading to Rochefort, sorrowful crowds are seen on carts or tramping along in files, on foot, the same as former chains of convicts. "An old man of eighty-two, Monsieur Dulaurent of Quimper, thus traverses four departments," in irons which strangle him. Following upon this, the poor creatures, between the decks of the "DÉcade" and the "Bayonnaise," crammed in, suffocated through lack of air and by the torrid heat, badly treated and robbed, die of hunger or asphyxia, while Guyanna completes the work of the voyage: out of 193 conveyed on board the 'DÉcade," only 39 remain at the end of twenty-two months, and of the 120 brought by the 'Bayonnaise," only one is left.—Meanwhile, in France, in the casemates of the islands of RhÉ and OlÉron, over twelve hundred priests become stifled or rot away, while, on all sides, the military commissioners in the departments shoot down vigorously. At Paris, and in its environs, at Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, Rennes, and in most of the large towns, sudden arrests and clandestine abductions go on multiplying.5186 "Nobody, on retiring to rest, is sure of awaking in freedom the next morning.... From Bayonne to Brussels, there is but one sentiment, that of unbounded consternation. No one dares either to speak to, encounter, look at or help one another. Everybody keeps aloof, trembles and hides away."—So that through this third offensive reaction, the Jacobin Conquest is completed, and the conquering band, the new feudalism, becomes a fixed installation. "All who pass here," writes a Tours habitant, "state that there is no difference in the country between these times and Robespierre's5187..... It is certain that the soil is not tenable, and that the people are continually threatened with exactions as in a conquered country.... Proprietors are crushed down with impositions to such an extent that they cannot meet their daily expenses, nor pay the cost of cultivation. In some of my old parishes the imposition takes about thirteen out of twenty sous of an income... The interest on money amounts to four per cent. a month... Tours, a prey to the terrorists who devour the department and hold all the offices, is in the most deplorable state; every family at all well-off, every merchant, every trader, is leaving it."—The veteran pillagers and murderers, the squireens, (hobereaux) of the reign of Terror, again appear and resume their fiefs. At Toulouse, it is Barrau, a shoemaker, famous up to 1792 for his fury under Robespierre, and Desbarreaux, another madman of 1793, formerly an actor playing the parts of valet, compelled in 1795 to demand pardon of the audience on his knees on the stage, and, not obtaining it, driven out of the house, and now filling the office of cashier in the theatre and posing as department administrator. At Blois, we find the ignoble or atrocious characters with whom we are familiar, the assassins and robbers HÉzine, Giot, Venaille, BÉzard, Berger, and Gidouin.5188 Immediately after Fructidor, they stirred up their usual supporters against the first convoy of the deported, "the idlers, the rabble of the harbor, and the dregs of the people," who overwhelmed them with insults. On this new demonstration of patriotism the government restores to them their administrative or judicial "satrapies, and, odious as they are, they are endured and obeyed, with the mute and mournful obedience of despair." The soul sinks5189 on daily perusing the executions of conscripts and ÉmigrÉs, and on seeing those condemned to transportation constantly passing by.... All who displease the government are set down on these lists of the dead, so-called ÉmigrÉs, this or that curÉ who is notoriously known not to have left the department." It is impossible for honest people to vote at the primary assemblies; consequently, "the elections are frightful. The "brothers" and their friends loudly proclaim that neither nobles, priests, proprietors, merchants, nor justice are wanted; everything is to be given up to pillage." Let France perish rather than accept their domination. "The wretches have announced that they will not give up their places without overthrowing all, destroying palaces and setting Paris on fire."