At the bottom of all this disorder, in almost every commune, is to be found the less than mediocre standard of the local authorities and the method of their recruitment.
Although since Fructidor election had been done away with as regards a certain number of posts, most public offices were still obtained by means of local suffrage. Nothing could be more natural in the case of the municipal body itself. But to employ the same procedure in the appointment of all those wielding a tittle of public authority, from the commanding officer of the national guard to the assessor of taxes, was obviously more dangerous, and it is easy to imagine the result.
Any citizen provided with a post is bound to serve those that appoint him. The Justice of the Peace will favour the plaintiff that canvassed for him, the revenue official will lighten the contributions due from the ground landlord whose vote he obtained; politics, in short, will be reduced to an exchange of services between elector and elect, and an exchange of countersigns between elect and elector. This, after all, is the eternal rule, the rule which, a century later, was to find expression in this heartfelt cry of one of our great men, 'Remember your constituencies I" The municipal officers of the year VIII had begun to think of theirs, and France was none the healthier for it.
Behaviour of this kind did not tend to increase the prestige of the communal Bench; the honest residue, towards the end of the Directory, shunned it more and more. In many regions candidates went on strike, and if they were appointed without having been notified, they hastened to resign. This was what happened, for instance, in 1797, in the pleasant town of Laval, where we learn from an official report that of eight municipal officers nominated by the electors only one accepted. "Moreover/ complains the author of the note, 'he was the least capable of the lot!'
The least capable was perhaps also the least honest, for everybody knows that appointments of this sort are only theoretically unpaid, and often bring those who know how to make use of them quite substantial advantages.
Bonaparte was soon to give a striking description of this game of grab developing in the country. In a note dictated to his brother Lucien he showed the 36,000 communes of France pillaged for the last six years by their municipal wardens. *In changing their mayors, deputy mayors and councillors', he said, 'they have mostly merely changed the method of brigandage; they have robbed the parish road, they have robbed the footpaths, they have robbed the trees, they have robbed the Church, they have robbed the chattels of the commune, and they are still robbing under the lax municipal regime of the year VIII.*
The more we consider this epoch, the more we see what a number of great and little plagues were tormenting the French. There were not only the collective misfortunes attacking a whole class of the nation, the reprisals inflicted on 140,000 emigres guilty of having crossed the frontier, or on other thousands of nobles guilty of having remained at home, and seized upon as scapegoats; 1 there were the dangers lying in wait for the ordinary individual, citizen or countryman, who took no part in politics, did nobody any harm, and was trying only to live in peace and avoid trouble, apparently without success.
He awoke every morning with a more or less heavy sword of Damocles hanging over his bed. Hadn't he paid his taxes? He saw the bailiff's man arriving and settling himself in the house, robbing his hen-roost, drinking his wine, stripping him of all he possessed by way of stimulating his zeal. Diet he need to go to market in the neighbouring town? The roads had become so bad that it was ten to one he would be upset, the remaining chance being that he would have to leave the cart stuck in a rut. Was he thinking of starting on a longer journey? Beware of risks in the diligencel Even if it was escorted by a military picket, this precaution might not always prevent attack. At the first turning the coach might be held up by bandits wearing masks or with faces blackened with soot, pointing pistols at the occupants and extracting from their pockets what the Gueux of the Nord, the Barbets of the Cevennes and the Chauffeurs of the Midi called in all honesty the King's share.
And the adventure wore still darker colours when these gentlemen came to carry out operations in the victim's house, as they had formed the habit of doing ever since the country had become transformed into an immense Foret de Bondy. 1 The scum of every party - deserting soldiers, aristocrats driven to extremes by fury and poverty, non-juring priests saying mass in the open fields., with two pistols in their belts and a musket laid across the altar/ all these pinchbeck ruffians parading as genuine bandits were sowing real terror in every part of the country. In the Var and in the Rousillon, on the Central Plateau and in Normandy, even in the lie de France itself, almost at the gates of the capital, they were engaged in ransacking the public coffers, intercepting couriers, murdering those unfortunates whose opinions displeased them, forcing their way into the homes of the purchasers of national property, holding them to ransom, and if the victims refused to say where their money was hidden, roasting their feet before the fire until a perfect understanding had been reached between roasters and roasted.
*The 'Law o£ Hostages* sanctioned the imprisonment of the relations of £mlgr£s, and of all ci-devant nobles in general. Their heads must answer for any crimes committed against the Republic.
Was it worth while having made the Revolution to arrive at this state of affairs? With the behaviour of savages prevailing, what was left of the Rights of Man and the fine promises of yesterday? One of the last commissaires sent by the Directory to carry the Good Word to the provinces towards the end of the year VII had drawn attention, even then, to the general disillusionment. 'There is no disguising the fact', he wrote, "that the French people today are a long way from the noble enthusiasm for their liberty and independence that helped them at the outset to accomplish so many miracles/
This amounted to an acknowledgement of the regime's bankruptcy. Dragging on for years, it resembled those religions whose temples are still standing, but whose cult has been reduced to purely external manifestations. The republican ideal still held sway by virtue of its rather puerile formalism, by the more or less severe rules to which it submitted the life of the period - special regalia, periodic festivals, an
*A notorious haunt of robbers in the department of the Seine. [Translator.] 3 On the 7th Prairial, year VIII, the prefect of the Card announced the arrest of one of the fiercest chiefs of the brigands of the Midi, a former prior, nicknamed 'Sans-Peur', who officiated surrounded by a veritable arsenal.
individual language, singular fashions - but if it still lingered in people's minds it no longer dwelt in their hearts.
To outward view nothing had changed. Beautiful vignettes and grandiloquent mottoes still headed official documents, there were still trees of liberty in the middle of the squares, men garbed in Roman togas on the benches of the Five Hundred. To avoid suspicion, one still had to address a man as Citoyen, not Monsieur, knock off work every tenth day unless it fell on a Sunday, and allow one's doorkeeper to address one with c thee ? and 'thou'.
But if the heritage of the Revolution was reduced to these advantages, could people be reproached for thinking them a trifle meagre? Some went further; they began to regret their old habits, the old calendar with its festivals and popular saints, the old money, less mendacious than the abominable assigned, permission to talk in the old way, to rest once a week, and to be called by other names than Lycurgus or Epaminondas,
To these disillusioned souls the conquests of the new era appeared somewhat negative; to a great many citizens they had merely brought a supplementary servitude. But no one dared to say this aloud, because of all confessions the hardest for a nation to make is that of having been 'duped by its principles'. The majority of Frenchmen went on proclaiming themselves, and even believing themselves to be, republicans, thanks to which the Directory still existed. But its days were numbered, none the less, and an accident was to prove enough to shorten its death rattle.