tee of Public Safety might send to them, even the most
confirmed Montagnards: Danton, who contrived the tribunal, will soon
discover this.--it is through these two government institutions that the
Committee of Public Safety keeps every head under the cleaver and each
head, to avoid being struck off, bows down,[11124] in the provinces as
well as in Paris.

This has happened when the existing local hierarchy was replaced by
new authorities making the omnipotent will of the Committee present
everywhere. Directly or indirectly, "for all government measures or
measures of public safety, all that relates to persons and the
general and internal police, all constituted bodies and all public
functionaries, are placed under its inspection."[11125] You may imagine
how the risk of being guillotined weighed upon them.

To suppress in advance any tendency to administrative inertia, it has
had withdrawn from the too powerful, too much respected, department
governments, "too inclined to federalism," their departmental dominance
and their "political influence."[11126] It reduces these to the levying
of taxes and the supervision of roads and canals; it purges them out
through its agents; it even purges out the governments of municipalities
and districts. To suppress beforehand all probability of popular
opposition, it has had the sessions of the sections reduced to two
per week; it installs in these sections, for about forty sous a day,
a majority of sans-culottes; it orders the suspension "until further
directives" of all municipal elections.[11127]

Finally, to have full control on the spot, it appoints its own men,
first, the commissioners and the representatives on missions, a sort of
temporary corps of directors sent into each department with unlimited
powers;[11128] next, a body of national agents, a sort of permanent
body of sub-delegates, through whom in each district and municipality it
replaces the procureurs-syndics.[11129] To this army of functionaries is
added in each town, bourg or large village, a revolutionary committee,
paid three francs a day per member, charged with the application of its
decrees, and required to make reports thereon. Never before was such
a vast and closely woven network cast from above to envelope and keep
captive twenty-six million people. Such is the real constitution which
the Jacobins substitute for the constitution they have prepared for
show. In the arsenal of the monarchy which they destroye