Nature and principle raise them above the law;
the district takes Marat under its protection, posts two sentinels at
his door to protect him from prosecutions, and uses arms against the
armed force sent with a warrant to arrest him.[64] yet more, in the
name of the city of Paris, "chief sentinel of the nation," they assume
to govern France: Danton betakes himself to the National Assembly and
declares that the citizens of Paris are the natural representatives of
the eighty-three departments, and summons it, on their injunction, to
cancel an act it has passed.[65] - The entire Jacobin conception is
therein expressed: Danton, with his keen insight, took it all in and
proclaimed it in appropriate terms; to apply it at the present time on
a grand scale,[66] he has merely to pass from the small theatre to the
large one, from the Cordeliers club to the Commune, to the Ministry,
and the Committee of Public Safety, and, in all these theatres, he
plays the same part with the same end in view and the same results. A
despotism formed by conquest and maintained by terror, the despotism
of the Jacobin Parisian rabble, is the end to which he directly
marches. He employs no other means and, adapting the means to the end
and the end to the means, manages the important days and instigates
the decisive measures of the Revolution: the 10th of August,[67] the
2nd of September, the 31st of May, the 2nd of June;[68] the decree
providing for an army of paid sans-culottes "to keep down aristocrats
with their pikes;" the decree in each commune where grain is dear,
taxing the rich to put bread within reach of the poor;[69] the decree
giving laborers forty sous for attending the meetings of the Section
Assemblies;[70] the institution of the revolutionary Tribunal;[71] the
proposal to erect the Committee of Public Safety into a provisional
government; the proclamation of Terror; the concentration of Jacobin
zeal on useful works; the employment of the eight thousand delegates
of the primary assemblies, who had been sent home as recruiting agents
for the universal armament;[72] the inflammatory expressions of young
men on the frontier; the wise resolutions for limiting the levy en
masse to men between eighteen and twenty-five, which put an end to the
scandalous songs and dances by the populace in the very hall of the
Convention.
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