They are not legally
qualified to take executive power; it is for the local magistrates,
the ?lus(elected) of the sections, and better still, the department committees
to command in the departments. Lodged as they are in official
quarters, they are merely to print formal statements, write letters,
and, behaving properly, wait until the sovereign people, their
employer, reinstates them. It has been outraged in their persons; it
must avenge itself for this outrage; since it approves of its
mandatories, it is bound to restore them to office; it being the
master of the house, it is bound to have its own way in the house. --
As to the department committees, it is true that, in the heat of the
first excitement, they thought of forming a new Convention at
Bourges,[61] either through a muster of substitute deputies, or
through the convocation of a national commission of one hundred and
seventy members. But time is wanting, also the means, to carry out
the plan; it remains suspended in the air like vain menace; at the end
of a fortnight it vanishes in smoke; the departments succeed in
federating only in scattered groups; they desist from the formation of
a central government, and thus, through this fact alone, condemn
themselves to succumb, one after the other, in detail, and each at
home.
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