The
Jurymen themselves are allowed eighteen francs a day, so that they may
attend to their business more leisurely. This business consists in
condemning without proof, without any pleadings, and scarcely any
examination, in a hurry, in batches, whoever the Committee 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,[124] 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."[125] 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had withdrawn from the too powerful, too much respected, department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.
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