At bottom, the government installed by the recent electoral comedy, for the major portion of the Parisians, has no authority but the fact of its existence; people put up with it because there is no other, fully recognizing its worthlessness;[3359] it is a government of strangers, of interlopers, of bunglers, of cantankerous, weak and violent persons.

The Convention has no hold either on the people or on the bourgeois class, and in proportion as it glides more rapidly down the revolutionary hill, it breaks one by one the ties with which it is still connected to the undecided.
In a reign of eight months the Convention has alienated public opinion entirely.

"Almost all who have property of any kind are conservative,"[3360] and all the conservatives are against it.

"The gendarmes here openly speak up against the Revolution, even up to the revolutionary tribunal, whose judgments they loudly condemn.

All the old soldiers detest the actual order of things."[3361]--The volunteers "who come back from the army appear angry at putting the King to death, and on that account they would flay all the Jacobins."[3362]--No party in the Convention escapes this universal disaffection and growing aversion.
"If the question of guillotining the members of the Convention could be put to an open vote, it would be carried against them by a majority of nineteen-twentieths,"[3363] which, in fact, is about the proportion of electors who, through fright or disgust, keep away from the polls.