All of them menaced, at first the
hundred and eighty autocrats who, before the concentration of the
revolutionary government, ruled for eight months boundlessly in the
provinces; next, and above all, the fifty hard-fisted "Montagnards,"
unscrupulous fanatics or authoritarian high livers, who, at this
moment, tread human flesh under foot and spread out in arbitrariness
like wild boars in a forest, or wallow in scandal, like swine in a
mud-pool.
There is no refuge for them, other than temporary, and temporary
refuge only in zealous and tried obedience, such as the Committee
demands proof of, that is to say, through rigor. - "The Committees so
wanted it," says later on Maignet, the arsonist of B?douin; "The
Committees did everything. . . . . Circumstances controlled me.
. . . . The patriotic agents conjured me not to give way. . . .
. I did not fully carry out the most imperative orders."[94] Similarly,
the great exterminator of Nantes, Carrier, when urged to spare the
rebels who surrendered of their own accord:
"Do you want me to be guillotined? It is not in my power to save those
people."[95]
And another time:
"I have my orders; I must observe them; I do not want to have
my head cut off!"
Under penalty of death, the representative on mission is a Terrorist,
like his colleagues in the Convention and on the Committee of Public
Safety, but with a much more serious disturbance of his nervous and
his moral system; for he does not operate like them on paper, at a
distance, against categories of abstract, anonymous and vague beings;
his work is not merely an effort of the intellect, but also of the
senses and the imagination.
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