"The rich and the merchants," writes an observer,[135] "are here, as
elsewhere, born enemies of equality and lovers of hideous federalism,
the only aristocracy that remains to be crushed out."
Barras, with still greater precision, declares in the tribune that,
"commerce is usurious, monarchical and anti-revolutionary."[136]
Considered in itself, it may be defined as an appeal to bad instincts;
it seems a corrupting, incivique, anti-fraternal institution, many
Jacobins having proposed either to interdict it to private persons and
attribute it wholly to the State, or suppress it along with the arts
and manufactures which nourish it, in order that only a population of
agriculturists and soldiers may be left in France.[137]
The second advantage and the second crime of the notables is
superiority of education. "In all respectable assemblages," writes a
Dutch traveler in 1795,[138] "you may be sure that one-half of those
present have been in prison. Add the absent, the guillotined, the
exiled, emigr?s, the deported, and note this, that, in the other
favored half, those who did not quaff the prison cup had had a
foretaste of it for, each expected daily to receive his warrant of
arrest; "the worst thing under Robespierre, as several old gentlemen
have told me, was that one never knew in the morning whether one would
sleep in one's own bed at night.
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